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Agencies

A graduate student arrested on suspicion of stabbing to death the professor who oversaw his work at the University of Southern California was quiet and didn’t seem to have many friends but never showed any signs that something may have been wrong, several people who knew him at the university said.
David Jonathan Brown, a 28-year-old brain and cognitive science student, was arrested on a murder charge in the Friday attack on the Los Angeles campus. His mentor, Bosco Tjan, was killed inside the Seeley G. Mudd building, where he runs an intensive lab that studies vision loss.
Brown, one of just five students who worked in the lab, was arrested without incident, police said, adding that the killing was targeted.
It wasn’t clear if Brown, who’s being held on a $1 million bond, had obtained an attorney.
In a biography page about the lab and the students involved in it, Brown’s is the only one without a detailed description or photograph. His Facebook page is also barren of any photographs and showed he had just a handful of friends.
Watch: ‘Universally loved’ psychology professor Bosco Tjan mentor students


Nathaniel Kwok, who recently finished working 18 months in the lab, said graduate students like Brown work there 40 to 60 hours a week and develop their own projects required to graduate.
Brown had been working in the lab since around 2013 but took a leave of absence for personal reasons last year that lasted roughly a semester, Kwok said. He didn’t know why Brown needed the time off or how close to graduation he was.
“He seemed normal for the most part. He was a little on the reserved side, but he was nice. He was friendly,” Kwok said from New York, where he’s now in medical school.
“There was nothing that ever would have given me some kind of indicator that he would be harbouring any kind of sentiment like this.”
Kwok said Tjan treated him as a son and that he always loved the professor’s honesty, good-natured sarcasm and sharp mind.

Chris Purington, project manager at Tjan’s lab, said he last saw Brown the day before the attack, when both he and Tjan attended a PhD student’s dissertation.
“It didn’t seem like anything was wrong. I didn’t see this coming,” Purington said. “When I heard a grad student did it I really expected it to be somebody I didn’t know.”
He described Brown as businesslike.
Kilho Shin, who also worked in Tjan’s lab, said Brown was quiet and seemed satisfied with Tjan’s oversight.

Outside Seeley G Mudd #USC where Prof #BoscoTjan stabbed to death. Grad student arrested @KNX1070 pic.twitter.com/jjgpvlovmD
— Ed Mertz (@knxedmertz) December 3, 2016

<![CDATA[// ><!]]>

He was universally admired and loved. This is almost unfathomable
Irving Biederman
“I don’t know what exactly happened between them. But as far as I know, Bosco likes David’s work and David also seemed to be satisfied with his supervising,” Shin said. “Their conversation on research was healthy and constructive.”
Irving Biederman, a neuroscience professor who was Brown’s adviser for a couple months, said he had heard from colleagues that Brown was not doing well in school, though he said he didn’t have first-hand knowledge of the student’s work.
As for Tjan, he said he knew the professor back when he was a student at the University of Minnesota in 1988 and that his death is a huge blow.
“This is the first time I’ve heard of any student having a problem with Bosco; he was universally admired and loved,” Biederman said. “This is almost unfathomable.”
Biederman said Tjan was gentle with students, though he was generous with constructive criticism.
Purington said he never heard of anyone having a problem with Tjan, a married father of one son listed in public records as 50 years old.
“He was somebody who really cared about people. I know he cared about me,” Purington said through tears.

David Clewett, a student in Tjan’s brain-imaging course, said his teacher was “a brilliant scientist and an exceptional person who was always kind, generous with his time, and genuinely cared about his students and colleagues.”
Student Kingson Man said: “He was the one we all went to with the really hard, really technical questions. He was a great scientist and role model.”
Li Zhongtang, a teaching assistant and fourth-year doctoral student in chemical engineering from Shanxi, China, said he was stunned when he learned of the slaying after encountering a campus police barricade and having to turn around and walk home.
He said the stabbing seemed more frightening than a shooting because it was up close and personal. Li said he does not feel as safe as before and is second-guessing how he interacts with his own students.
“I think I’m good with my students, but even so, I will be even more careful now on whether I’m going too hard on them,” he said.
I’m worried. It seems like more and more people are losing self-control
Li Zhongtang
“I’m worried. It seems like more and more people are losing self-control. … USC is a good school. The students here work hard to come here. They have a good education — how can anyone act like this?” he said. “I’ve been here for so long; this is the worst thing to have happened on campus, the hardest to understand.”
He said he thinks about the other senseless violence that has occurred in the area. “Random killings off campus, now a stabbing on campus,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m just trying to graduate as soon as possible,” he said, walking quickly away.
In July 2014, Ji Xinran — then a 24-year-old engineering student — was bludgeoned to death near campus with a baseball bat and wrench while walking home from a study group. He managed to crawl to his apartment but died in his bed.
Prosecutors say three males and a female targeted him because he was Chinese, and they suspected he had money. All four were charged with one count of murder each, with the special circumstance of murder during an attempted robbery in the attack, which was caught on surveillance cameras.

A jury convicted the female — Alejandra Guerrero, now 18 — of first-degree murder in October. Trials for the three men — Andrew Garcia, 20, Jonathan Del Carmen, 21, and Alberto Ochoa, 19 — are expected to begin next year.
Two other graduate students from China were slain less than a mile from USC in April 2012. Qu Ming and Wu Ying, who were studying electrical engineering, were talking after a night at the library, parked outside the home where Wu lived on a tree-lined stretch of Raymond Avenue just south of Adams Boulevard.
A gunman approached Qu’s BMW and opened fire on both students, shooting Qu in the head and Wu in the chest. Qu attempted to run for help and was found collapsed on a nearby porch, while Wu was discovered slumped over in the passenger seat of the car.

Javier Bolden and Bryan Barnes were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of the murders.
The attacks made headlines around the world and prompted USC to beef up safety measures for foreign students. Upgrades include requirements for international graduate students to take “extended safety education” programs, a new international student safety advisory group and campus police training about the different cultures of international students.
Tjan joined USC in 2001, taught in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and served as co-director of the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Centre.
The stabbing comes six months after a well-loved professor was fatally shot on the nearby UCLA campus. Authorities believe former student Mainak Sarkar killed his estranged wife in a Minneapolis suburb before driving across the country to Los Angeles and fatally shooting engineering professor William Klug and killing himself on June 1. Klug had helped Sarkar earn his engineering Ph.D. in 2013.
Associated Press, Tribune News Service

The universally loved professor  who was stabbed to death by ‘nice’ student at California college

USC Professor Bosco Tjan. A graduate student arrested on suspicion of stabbing Tjan to death was being held on $1 million bail. Photo: AP

In a biography page about the lab and the students involved in it, Brown’s is the only one without a detailed description or photograph.

FILE - In this Jan. 12, 2015, file photo, Alejandra Guerrero, left, appears in Los Angeles Superior Court with her attorney Errol Cook, right. Guerrero was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016, in the beating death of a Chinese graduate student at the University of Southern California as he walked home after a late-night study session. Guerrero was the first of four people to be tried in the slaying of 24-year-old Xinran Ji during a robbery attempt in 2014. (Al Seib /Los Angeles Times via AP, Pool, File

Authorities responded to a fatal stabbing on the University of Southern California campus on Friday, Dec. 2, 2016.

FILE - An April 13, 2012, file combo made from undated file photos released by the Los Angeles Police Department shows shooting victims Ming Qu, left, and Ying Wu. Jurors in the case of a man charged with the murders of the Chinese students at the University of Southern California were played a videotape Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014, where he bragged about the shootings. Prosecutors played the video of Javier Bolden boasting to a cellmate after his arrest in the killings. The 23-year-old engineering students were shot on April 11, 2012 while sitting in a parked car in a neighborhood near the campus.(AP Photo/Los Angeles Police Department, File)

USC Dornsife's Bosco S. Tjan (above) and USC graduate student Anirvan S. Nandy theorized in a new paper that peripheral vision is hindered by the visual experience formed in the brain during eye movements. Photo by Dietmar Quistorf.

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