PEORIA, Ill.—Jurors deliberated less than 90 minutes before returning a guilty verdict on June 24 at the federal death-penalty trial of a former University of Illinois doctoral student who killed a visiting scholar from China after abducting her at a bus stop.
Brendt Christensen, 29, looked straight ahead and showed no emotion as a guilty verdict was announced against him. The swift conviction was expected because Christensen’s attorneys acknowledged from the start that he raped and stabbed Yingying Zhang in June 2017. Prosecutors say he beat her to death with a baseball bat and decapitated her.
