Lawyers, Family Friends of Xinran Ji say USC Needs to Make Campus Safer
Video by Faith Miller
Family and friends of USC grad student Xinran Ji mourned the 24 year old Thursday at a funeral service in Alhambra.
Ji was fatally beaten on Wednesday, July 23 on the corner of Orchard Avenue and 29th Street, about a block from USC's campus, apparently walking home from a study group.
"[Xinran was] such an innocent and excellent boy, and these criminals killed him," Lisheng Liu, a cousin of Ji's father, said. "It cannot be understood."
Liu said Ji's parents' primary concern is that the people who killed their son are punished. "The person who killed Xinran, that person deserves capital punishment," Liu, representing Ji's parents, who were too upset to speak, said. "It is not only to make Xinran peaceful, but also to send out a warning - don't do this again."
Xinran is the only child of his parents Songbo Ji and Jinhui Du and the only grandchild of his four grandparents, who are all still alive. "When they heard about this terrible news, they were shocked. It was like heaven fell down, like the sky fell, because he is their hope, their only hope," Liu said.
Songbo is a teacher and Du works in a hospital, Liu said. "They are ordinary people. They really used all of their savings to support Xinran to come to the U.S. and study," Liu said.
The last time the parents saw Ji was in December of 2013. He stayed at USC over the summer to take classes in order to graduate early. After earning his Master's Degree, Ji had planned to pursue a PhD in the U.S.
Daniel Deng, an attorney who helped the families of the two Chinese graduate students murdered in 2012, is volunteering his legal services to Ji's family. He says USC must protect its Chinese students better.
"You're educating people to do the right thing, so do the right thing. No more tragedies. No more funerals here," Deng said.
Deng said if USC does not increase security, he will urge the Chinese government to put USC on an alert list. "The state department will advise our citizens 'Don't travel to this dangerous area,'" Deng said.
Family friend and translator George He said Ji and his parents' number one concern when choosing a graduate school was safety. "Of course they knew that two Chinese students had been killed [at USC]," He said. "They thought the school would put a lot more effort in to make sure this kind of thing wouldn't happen again."
Yes, Los Angeles IS a dangerous area. USC is surrounded by ghettoes, filled with poor, opportunistic minorities. Our international students need to be extra cautious about their safety instead of flaunting their, albeit meager, wealth and check their superiority attitudes at the door when they leave both campus and home. As one can see, Angelenos will kill anyone, at random, for no good reason.