UT - Zhifan Dong, 19, University of Utah student from China killed by boyfriend, 11 February 2022

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Documents reveal offers to help, missed opportunities before a U. student was killed in a Salt Lake hotel

The University of Utah has released hundreds of pages of documents that detail the university’s interactions with a 19-year-old, first-year student from China who police say experienced domestic violence and later died when her boyfriend allegedly injected her with a lethal dose of illegal drugs in a downtown hotel.

The extensive report released Tuesday details many offers to help Zhifan Dong, who died Feb. 11, as well as her boyfriend, also a U. student from China, but the two largely declined help or did not respond to offers of assistance. It also acknowledges mistakes and missed opportunities by university staff and police.

Haoyu Wang, 27, is charged with murder.

A student from China told the University of Utah her boyfriend was threatening her. She was found dead weeks later.

Zhifan Dong is the second University of Utah student in four years to be killed after reporting threats from a boyfriend to school officials.

A trove of documents released by the University of Utah on Tuesday reveals a series of failures leading up to the death of a Chinese student, allegedly at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

Salt Lake City police found international student Zhifan Dong, 19, dead in an off-campus motel room on Feb. 11, when they responded to reports from the University of Utah police department that a man was threatening to kill his girlfriend, officials said. Dong’s former boyfriend, Haoyu Wang, 26, was also in the room when police arrived and claimed he had killed Dong before trying to take his own life with drugs, according to the report. He is also an international student from China who was studying at the University of Utah, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

Wang has been charged with murder and the attorney representing him, Joseph C. Alamilla, entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.

 

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Bailey McGartland, Dong’s roommate who is also a student at the school, told the campus newspaper she helped Dong file reports of domestic violence and requests for wellness checks.

“I felt so angry,” McGartland told the Daily Utah Chronicle. “It was absolutely preventable.”

The documents, which were made public after The Salt Lake City Tribune pushed for public records on the case to be released, describe how former campus-housing employees delayed notifying the university’s police department about reports of intimate partner violence. They also provide evidence of “insufficient and unprofessional internal communication,” University President Taylor Randall said, as well as “processes, procedures and trainings in housing that needed to be clarified and improved.”