Man Found Guilty in Killing of 2 USC Students
The graduate engineering students were sitting in a car near the campus when they were shot to death.
Javier Bolden was found guilty of first degree murder in the April 2012 botched robbery killing of two University of Southern California graduate electrical engineering students from China near the campus in Los Angeles.
After deliberating a day and half, the jury reached a decision Monday that Bolden, 22, killed Ming Qu and Ying Wi on a rainy night as the USC students sat in Qu’s 2003 BMW in the 2700 block of Raymond Ave., less than a mile from campus. Bryan Barnes, Bolden’s accomplice, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in February after prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty against him and invoke a life sentence.
In order to solve the case, a police informant went undercover as Bolden’s cellmate, according to the Neon Tommy report, and recorded him bragging about how he and Barnes committed the crime.
After the killings, USC added security ambassadors, staffed by Contemporary Service Corp. and increased Department of Public Safety patrols. They also erected fences to keep non-students off the campus after 9 p.m.
A suit by Qu and Wu’s parents against USC for providing misleading information about security measures around the university was dismissed in court.
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