Qinxuan Pan was calm and chatty, not edgy or nervous, when the MIT graduate student showed up at a Mansfield car dealership around 11 a.m. last Saturday to pick up the 2015 GMC Terrain SLE he claimed he was so interested in buying he wanted his mechanic to look it over, a salesman said.
James P. Roane, who was confident after 21 years in the business that he had made a sale and that Pan was someone who could be trusted, said he attached dealer plates to the $15,000 SUV and watched the 29-year-old drive out of the lot.
“That was the last time I saw him,” Roane said of Pan, who is now wanted for questioning in the the killing of Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang in New Haven.
Jiang, 26, who was engaged to a 2020 MIT graduate Zion Perry, was shot to death last Saturday in what police initially thought was a road rage incident.
Police now suspect Jiang was targeted and have said they want to talk with Pan, whose last known address was a family-owned home on Clifton Street in Malden. State and Malden police searched the home this week but did not find Pan, officials said Thursday.
According to MIT, Pan completed undergraduate coursework in 2014 and has since been a graduate student in the school’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“Mr. Pan has been enrolled as a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since September 2014,” the school said in a statement. “He received undergraduate degrees from the Institute in computer science and mathematics in June 2014.”
MIT also said Perry earned a bachelor of science in biological engineering and was a member of the 2020 undergraduate class.
It was not immediately known if Pan and Perry knew each other while they were at MIT.
Some 700 people, including Jiang’s parents and Perry, attended a virtual remembrance of him organized by the Yale School of Environment on Feb. 8, according to the Yale News, the university’s news magazine. Jiang was described as a current member of the Connecticut National Guard having previously served in the US Army. He was a native of Chicago and was in his second year as a graduate student, the school reported.
Perry and Jiang met while both were volunteers at the Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven, and the couple had recently become engaged, according to university publications.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Roane said he was questioned by State Police about his interactions with Pan. “He was genuinely a nice man. Not demanding at all,” said Roane. “I thought I had done a pretty good job with this gentleman and I thought – this is a sale!”
Roane said Pan first arrived at the dealership last Thursday saying he was currently driving a rented Chevrolet Spark and wanted to look at used SUVs in the $15,000 price range. Roane said he first showed Pan a Chevrolet Trax, but was told by Pan it was too small for his needs.
Roane then showed him the much larger Terrain.
“He literally laid down in the back and said ‘this will be fine. This will work,’ " Roane said in a telephone interview Thursday, adding that Pan told him he often slept in his vehicle during road trips as an explanation for laying down in the back of the SUV.
Roane said Pan’s decision to buy the Terrain after lying down was a “weird” one because when the seats are lowered, the resulting surface is bumpy and not conducive to sleeping. Other SUVs offer better sleeping options, he said.
According to Roane and a Mansfield police report filed in court, Pan texted around 3:30 p.m. Saturday and asked if he could bring the SUV back after the 5 p.m. closing time, and was told that he had to return it on time. Roane and other employees spent the next several hours trying to reach Pan again without success and reported the missing SUV to police around 7:30 p.m.
Mansfield police asked Malden police to check at Pan’s residence for the SUV, where they spoke with his mother. “She told them that Qinxuan changed his cell phone number and wouldn’t tell them where he was,” Mansfield police wrote. Officers in Malden “said they have responded to her residence many times for mental illness issues,” the report stated.
Mansfield police posted a BOLO for the SUV as a stolen car around 10:40 p.m. and five minutes later, North Haven, Connecticut, police reported finding the Terrain stuck and disabled on railroad tracks. Pan, the Connecticut department said, had been driving it in a junkyard when it got stuck.
Pan, authorities alleged, had removed the Massachusetts dealer plate and was driving the SUV with Connecticut plates when they found him. The SUV was inoperable and police directed Pan toward a nearby motel, but he could not be found when police later went looking for him, according to records.
On Thursday, police were searching the snow banks in the neighborhood near the motel, the New Haven Register reported.
Mansfield police obtained an arrest warrant charging Pan with stealing the SUV.
“It’s just the most bizarre thing ever in my years in the business,” Roane said. “And it gets eerier every day.”
Jeremiah Manion of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him @JREbosglobe.