You may have come across this recent story of Agatha Christie in the 21st century.
A University of Wyoming student was arrested after police say she tried to poison a colleague, then attempted to flee to China when officers questioned her.
Aili Wang, 32, was questioned by campus police after surveillance cameras set up by a coworker experiencing medical symptoms allegedly caught her rinsing his mug with liquid from her own cup on Oct. 1, according to a University of Wyoming police affidavit, which added that she was seen on camera “taking photos and manipulating notebooks.”
Wang didn’t get along with the coworker, who wasn’t named in court documents. Surveillance footage allegedly showed Wang searching through the victim’s desk; the victim specialized in disease treatment technology, work similar to what she had done in China.
The liquid was identified as acrylamide, a chemical that can “cause a number of health problems, including cancer,” according to the American Cancer Society. According to authorities, Wang purchased the chemical through eBay. It was discovered after the victim’s wife ran a test on water taken from the coffee maker he used to brew tea.
Now you may think this is just some sort of bizarre thing that one crazy person did. But there’s been a pattern of such incidents all involving foreign researchers and students involved in the sciences on college campuses.
Meanwhile, David Xu is back in the news after a pro-crime justice system chose to expunge his conviction.
A Berkeley engineer whose co-worker was convicted of poisoning her is speaking publicly about the case for the first time after a court agreed to expunge his felony conviction despite objections from prosecutors.
Rong Yuan said she spent years trying to understand a series of unexplained health problems starting in 2017, including vomiting and hair loss, before discovering what she says was happening at her workplace.
For more than two years, she sought answers from countless doctors, but her condition continued to worsen.
The breakthrough came after her mother noticed an unusual smell coming from her water bottle. When cleaning it did not solve the problem, Yuan decided to install a small camera at her desk.
The camera captured a co-worker, David Xu, pouring a substance into her water bottle.
Testing later identified the substance as cadmium, a toxic chemical.
Xu is a chemical engineer at Berkeley Engineering and Research.
Here’s one from this April. Unlike the others, the perpetrator here is Japanese, not Chinese.
A University of Wisconsin lab worker allegedly confessed to using ChatGPT to help plot the poisoning of his rival colleague over a longstanding grudge, according to authorities.
Makoto Kuroda, a 41-year-old staff scientist at the university’s Influenza Research Institute in the School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison, was charged with recklessly endangering safety and tampering with a household product, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The Post.
University police officers arrived at the lab on April 6 after receiving a report of possible chemicals discovered in an employee’s water bottle, the criminal complaint detailed.
That employee, identified in court documents by the initials TM, grew suspicious after taking a sip from a Trader Joe’s water bottle and spitting it out when he noticed “a strange taste,” the complaint said.
Two days later, he “observed this strange odor from his shoes” and believed it to be chloroform, court documents added.
Kuroda then allegedly told police that he had developed a longstanding grudge against TM over his behavior at work, including not following the “lab rule of wearing a lab coat and goggles.”
Here’s a story from 2023 involving a U of F PhD Chemistry student
A Florida man is facing charges after police say he may have been attempting to poison his neighbors by injecting chemicals under the front door of their apartment.
Police say undercover video shows 36-year-old Xuming Li allegedly sticking a syringe under his neighbors’ front door and injecting a liquid into the Tampa Bay apartment.
Umar Abdullah, 36, lives inside that apartment with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. He says for more than a month, a chemical smell in their home was making his family sick. The symptoms included a headache worse than a migraine, nausea, shortness of breath, drowsiness and hair loss.
Here’s a similar story from 2018.
A Lehigh University student has been arrested after authorities say he had been trying to kill his roommate for months.
Prosecutors announced Thursday that 22-year-old Yukai Yang will be charged with attempted homicide and related offenses.
It was inside his Lehigh University dorm where police say the student from China developed a murder plot, and carried it out trying to discreetly and slowly kill his roommate.
Authorities say Yang, a chemistry major, sickened his roommate with thallium and possibly other chemicals last spring. Juwan Royal experienced symptoms that included dizziness, shaking and vomiting, and his blood tested positive for thallium.
And another story from 2018 in Canada.
A graduate student who pleaded guilty to poisoning a fellow chemist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada has received a seven-year prison sentence for ‘administering a noxious substance’, and ‘aggravated assault’. The court deducted time already served, meaning that Zijie Wang, a chemistry PhD candidate, will spend just under six years in prison for repeatedly smuggling the carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) into the food and drink of the victim, a postdoctoral fellow at the university.
And 2015 in Stanford.
Xiangyu Duyang, 26, a graduate student from Singapore, was captured by a security camera during the time she allegedly poisoned four of her labmates by contaminating their drinking water bottles with the cancer-causing chemical paraformaldehyde.
“I’ve never heard of something as extreme as this,” said student Jamie Blundell.
Most Stanford students are just starting to hear about the case, even though it happened late last year. Court documents say graduate students doing stem cell research in the Lorry Lokey Building near the Stanford Medical Center began smelling paraformadehyde when they drank from their water bottles during September and October of last year.
Some students ingested enough to give them burning sensations in their mouths and throats. All of the victims are women. They began to suspect Duyang when she was spotted and photographed in stem cell incubators where she didn’t belong. And at the same time, the students tell investigators their stem cells began mysteriously dying.
There’s some obvious patterns here.
1. The perpetrators are grad students or professors in the sciences who have access to noxious chemicals and the expertise to use them.
2. Their targets are generally fellow Asians or third worlders. That’s interesting. But it may also be that these cultures are predisposed to suspect someone of poisoning them whereas most westerners wouldn’t even think of such things outside a Poirot yarn.
3. Professional rivalry likely plays a role. China is very academically competitive and while the vast majority of students aren’t poisoning people, clearly some are, while others understand that such behaviors exist.Call it ‘cultural differences’. Or something else to be aware of.
Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine
