There seems to have been no mainstream news reporting about the most recent student murder case at Virginia Tech. Last Wednesday, January 21, a Chinese graduate student, Yang Xin (female), was decapitated by a fellow Chinese graduate student in the cafe on the university. Zhu Haiyang is charged with first-degree murder and is currently in custody. Motives are still unclear. See Shanghaiist post and youtube clip here. The youtube clip is a tape of local news.
Of course I'm very curious about why the crime happened, but what really disturbs me is why no one in US media seems to care about it. Here are the only two mainstream sources I found: a Chicago Tribune article that doesn't even talk about the victim or murderer and a Huffington post article from AP reporting that provides a smidge more detail on the crime. Both articles focus on the trigger and use of the "crisis notification system" installed after the massacre at VTech in 2007 (where 30 students died at the hands of Seung-Hui Cho). No biographical details about the individuals involved in the 2009 case are provided. Were these reports too immediate (too "breaking") to release those details? If so, why haven't subsequent reports disclosed more information? Or is there no medida attention because it's just seen as an ethnic case? (Chinese on Chinese doesn't matter.) Or because it's just one death, not 30? Or am I just making this a bigger deal than it really is?
Please share your thoughts!
Linda Li '09
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3 comments:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012303943.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/22/virginia.tech.death/
(with some bio)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090122/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_slaying
(also with some bio)
I would disagree with the statement that there's been no mainstream news about it. As callous as it may sound, this is one murder as opposed to the 30 from the VTech massacre in 2007 - you simply can't expect the same kinds of media coverage for the two.
It also could just be that the parents or the police didn't want to release the details. I went to a university that had a few suicides within a short span of each other (couple years ago) and the school held out releasing the details for a couple days. Many students complained, but it's bordering on respecting and complying to what the families actually want, but also keeping people (students/media) informed.
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