Our case begins at The University of Illinois. It was the spring semester & 26-year-old Yingying Zhang decided to leave home & study abroad. She was a graduate of one of the top universities in China & people described it as the Harvard of China. Yingying’s decision to move across the globe was not surprising to those who knew her as she was very brave & adventurous. She was extremely smart & excelled in her studies. Days before leaving she celebrated her birthday & turned it into a farewell party, a temporary goodbye to her friends & family as she embarked on this experience. She picked The UofI because of the field she was studying which was environmental sciences. She also wanted to begin a Ph.D. program by the fall.
As she moved to a brand new country the move was as hard as you would expect. She had all summer to meet people & finalize plans before the fall semester started. She kept a journal during this time & also purchased a guitar to play in her free time. She jumped into working at the school & tried to stay busy.
On Friday, June 9th, 2017, a normal summer day, Yingying went to Turner hall that morning where she worked in a lab with some other students in her field. She told her coworker that she had an appointment that day at around 1:30 to maybe sign a new lease. She was currently living on the south campus in married housing which was not her situation. So she wanted to move more north which was less expensive & less married couples. Over the lunch hour, she was going to tour another apartment complex & told her coworker she would be gone for roughly two hours but would be back after.
As one o’clock rolls around Yingying leaves Turner hall & goes to her appointment. Around 1:30 she texts the manager & tells him she will be late & will get there around 2:10. But then 2:35 rolls around & she still hadn’t shown up. The manager texts her & asks if she is still coming & gets no response. Therefore, missing her appointment that Friday afternoon.
Around 3:30-4 o’clock, her co-worker back in Turner hall gets worried since she still hasn’t returned. The time dragged on & attempted to call her but was left with no response.
That night & still no sign of Yingying, her coworker goes to Yingying’s current apartment building to look for her but after knocking on the door several times with no response, her coworker becomes more & more concerned. Her coworker & friends decide to make their way to the university police office & report Yingying as missing.
The police department struggled to take this report too seriously as Yingying was a full-grown adult, it was the summer, & it wasn’t like she was gone for too long, it was only a few hours. But her friends & co-workers knew something was wrong but since the police wouldn’t listen they went to camp out in the parking lot of Yingying’s apartment complex hoping she would show up & it would all be a misunderstanding.
The next morning, June 10th, 2017, Yingying was still missing. No one had seen or heard from her since she messaged the manager the day before. One of her friends calls a news station reporter & tells her that their friend was missing & if there was any way they could mention it on today’s news since no one else was taking them seriously. The news reporter hears the panic in the friend’s voice & thinks running a story on the missing student couldn’t hurt.
With the release of the article & the persistence of Yingyings friends, police finally make their way to Yingyings apartment to look around. When they arrived they said the apartment was in normal condition. It didn’t look like she was planning on moving or had moved. Since Yingying didn’t have a car & only used buses for transportation which is supposedly how she would have been getting to her appointment, police look at bus surveillance footage to see if she was ever on the bus & if so when she got off. There were about 2000 bus cameras at the time of her disappearance meaning lots of time & manpower to go through all of that footage. Luckily since they knew she would be coming from the lab & going to the appointment, also around what time, they were able to narrow down the footage a bit.
On June 12th, 2017, They end up finding footage of Yingying boarding the bus at 1:30 pm. She is seen walking towards the back of the bus & sitting down. This bus stop was right outside of her current apartment building so they assume that before she went to the bus stop, she went to her house first which is why she was going to be late. The weird thing about the bus was that it was headed East but she was supposed to be touring North apartments. They keep watching & see she gets off in the middle of campus & then is seen chasing after another bus trying to flag it down. They assume she accidentally boarded the wrong bus, got off, & tried getting on the right one. She did end up missing the bus she was chasing so she ended up having to wait for another one, pushing back her time even more. They immediately get a hold of parking garage footage next to the bus stop since of course after the buses drove away there was no more footage coming from them. You can see her waiting for the bus but before the next bus can arrive, a black sedan passes her, goes off-camera of course, but less than a minute later drives back up to Yingying & pulls over. You can see her going up to the passenger side window, talking with the driver for about a minute, & then hopping in & driving away. This missing person case had just possibly turned into a kidnapping case.
Police try to continue tracking the car with other cameras but eventually, the car would drive out of view of any surrounding cameras. Also, all of the footage was too grainy to make out what the license plate was. This is when the police knew they needed to get the FBI involved. It had only been three days but for all, we know Yingying could be in desperate need of time-sensitive help.
An FBI agent who gets put on the case identifies the car as a Saturn Astra. The cars were very unique. They were only produced for a short period of time & had to be imported into the US once you bought them. If it had been a Honda, Toyota, etc, the model would have been useless. But luckily this car was so rare there were only 58 in the whole state.
Posters began appearing around campus & news reports started to be released for anyone who could help. Luckily word was spread to the right person who had also almost been abducted by him. She identified the car & told her side of the story.
The man had disguised himself as an undercover police officer & told her to get in his car because he needed to ask her a few questions about the neighborhood. She saw this as a major red flag & didn’t cooperate. But she said he was wearing mirrored sunglasses so she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup of people.
