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Defense lawyers of a former doctoral student at the University of Illinois admitted Wednesday before the jury that their client had brutally beaten and killed a foreign student in exchange for China, while stressing that he "was under sentence of death", in a death sentence case.
"Brendt Christensen killed Yingying Zhang," said Christensen's lawyer, George Tesseff, though he challenges essential details in the prosecutor's version of the events that resulted in the death of the aspiring professor. , 26 years old.
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Prosecutors allege that Christensen, a 29-year-old physics student, became obsessed with serial killers a few months before the attack and had pulled Zhang into his vehicle on June 9, 2017. She was about to sign a lease with one and he had just missed the bus when Christensen approached her in his vehicle and told him to come in. He told her that he was a policeman under cover and that he had to ask him questions.
Zhang, who had been in the United States for only two months and did not speak English fluently, was forced.
Christensen drove Zhang to his apartment, where he tied her up and raped her in her room, before stabbing her, as evidenced by the splashing of blood in her room. Zhang, small at 5 feet 4 inches, tried to defend herself but Christensen began to choke him. According to Attorney Eugene Miller, he dragged her later in her bathroom, criticizing her and "cracking her head open" with a baseball bat. He then decapitated him and threw away his body, which was never found.
Prosecutors will have to prove that Zhang died in the absence of body, but more and more evidence, including those of a dog sniffing corpses used by the authorities of the day. Christensen's apartment, indicate the presence of a corpse.
Zhang's parents traveled to the United States from China to help find their daughter after her disappearance in 2017 and returned to Illinois with Zhang's boyfriend for trial.
Christensen's girlfriend helped the FBI get her arrest by carrying a wire. He was arrested on June 30, 2017, the day of his birthday. She will be a prosecution witness.
Miller threw a bomb in his opening statements when he informed the court that Christensen had been trapped by an FBI e-mail boasting of killing 12 other people before Zhang, claims that the authorities have not yet substantiated.
The defense attorney, Tesseff, denied these assertions, claiming that his client was a heavy drinker and that he was drunk when he made these statements.
Christensen risks the death sentence when he is convicted of murder, which is the first case of death penalty since Illinois banned the death penalty.
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The jury is made up of 12 people who believe in the death penalty, criteria that must be respected in a federal capital punishment case.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
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