Yingying ZHANG 章莹颖

choi

Julie Wurth. Accused Kidnapper Held Without Bail; Feds Say Scholar Fought Him at Apartment. Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette, July 6, 2017.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news ... -him-apartment.html

Note:
(a) "at a detention hearing for Brendt Christensen, 28, at the federal courthouse in Urbana on Wednesday [July 5] afternoon.  US Magistrate Judge [a magistrate judge presides over this hearing, afterwards, a federal district judge takes over] Eric Long ordered Christensen, 28, a former UI graduate student from Wisconsin, held in federal custody without bail indefinitely until his trial. Long called Christensen both a flight risk and a danger to the community. * * * 'We will be forced to be sitting in a jail cell an hour away [from the courthouse] every time we want to talk to him about this case,' Bruno said.  Asked by the judge how that pertained to the question of bail, [defense attorney] Evan Bruno said it's important for the attorneys to have good communication with their client, to see if he can provide any helpful information.  The judge said those issues weren't relevant to Wednesday's detention hearing and could be discussed "at a later date."
(i) United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un ... istrict_of_Illinois
(in Urbana, IL)
(ii) I fail to comprehend why this is a federal case, as opposed to state charge in a state court. I can not find the federal charge lodged against Christensen.
(iii) factors a judge considers in a federal detention hearing:

United States v Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 742-743 (1987)
https://scholar.google.com/schol ... amp;as_sdt=40000006
(two consecutive paragraphs starting with the sentence: "To this end, § 3141(a) of the Act requires a judicial officer to determine whether an arrestee shall be detained.")

(b) "The judge agreed with [federal prosecutor Bryant] Freres that Christensen posed a flight risk, noting that he is unemployed and has few family members in town and limited ties to the community since graduating from the UI in May."
(i) Jeff D'Alessio and Ben Zigterman, UPDATED: Former Grad Student Arrested in UI Scholar's Disappearance; FBI Presumes Her Dead, Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette, June 30, 2017
http://www.news-gazette.com/news ... nce-fbi-presumes-he
(Zhang disappeared on June 9)

Quote: Christensen "on his LinkedIn page described himself as a PhD candidate studying experimental condensed matter physics at the UI.  He arrived at the UI in August 2013, following four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics. According to his self-written bio, that stretch included spending the 2012-13 school year serving as a research assistant in Switzerland, where he analyzed data created at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle collider.  His responsibilities at Illinois as a graduate teaching assistant beginning in 2013 included supervising and guiding" undergraduates.

This report said UI's only statement so far about Zhang's disappearance "made no specific mention of Christensen." So it is unlikely that the university fired Christensen. It is possible that a teaching assistant's contract ends at the end of a semester, in May. However, I was a RESEARCH assistant at UI, too, and received stipend year-round. (Foreigners was assigned to research assistant, to project slides in a weekly seminar, for example. Americans got teaching assistants. But most of the time, neither jobs require working. The job titles follow complaints of undergraduates who said they could not understand foreign accents. The stipend was the same.)
(ii) Kaylee Hartung, Janet DiGiacomo and Darran Simon, Prosecutor: Suspect in Chinese Student's Kidnapping Discussed 'Ideal Victim'. CNN, July 6, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/us ... l-denied/index.html
("Christensen, who is currently unemployed, was a graduate student in the University of Illinois' physics department and a teaching assistant until May, Lance Cooper, an associate head for graduate studies in the department, said")

There is no need to read the rest of this CNN report.