CHICAGO, June 14 (Xinhua) -- The trial of Brendt Christensen, who is accused of kidnapping and killing Chinese visiting scholar Zhang Yingying in 2017, continued Friday with the video from a second interview the FBI conducted with Christensen played in court.
The third day of testimony for the trial started from 9 a.m. (1400 GMT) at a federal courthouse in Peoria, U.S. state of Illinois, after local police and FBI agents testified in the previous day.
Christensen's father was in court Friday and had a brief exchange with his son.
Christensen smiled when he saw his dad, saying "how's it going?"
Families of both sides and jury watched the video of an FBI agent interviewing Christensen on June 17, 2017, in which he appeared to try to clean up some earlier statements that he had made to investigators.
The FBI agent asked in the video for Christensen's whereabouts on June 9, the day Zhang disappeared.
"I just drove around everywhere," Christensen said and was getting a bit bored when he saw Zhang. "She looked panicky," he said, so he offered her a ride.
Christensen said that when he was asked previously about Zhang's disappearance, he legitimately didn't recognize her as the girl he picked up because all Asians look the same.
On Thursday, a video from another interview the FBI conducted with the accused killer was played in court.
On Wednesday, one of Christensen's attorneys admitted in the court that the defendant indeed kidnapped and killed Zhang. However, Christensen is not changing his not guilty plea.
The defense said they will make an effort to spare Christensen the death penalty.
Zhang, a 26-year-old visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), went missing on June 9, 2017, after getting into a black Saturn Astra about five blocks from where she got off a bus on her way to an apartment complex to sign a lease.
Police arrested Christensen on June 30, 2017, who was a former UIUC doctoral student, and charged him with the kidnapping, torturing and killing of Zhang.
