A Chinese national who has been charged by the Justice Department with using a drone to take photos near a naval shipyard in Virginia is scheduled to appear in court next month.
Court documents alleged that Mr. Shi, a foreign student visa holder, flew to Virginia on Jan. 5 to take a break from his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. Upon arrival, he rented a car at the airport.
The court documents state that the weather was inclement at the time and that the drone got stuck in a resident’s tree. Mr. Shi then sought help from the resident, who asked him several questions, including his nationality.
The unnamed resident then took photos of Mr. Shi, his ID, and the license plate of the vehicle before calling the Newport News Police Department (NNPD).
Mr. Shi appeared “very nervous” when questioned by responding NNPD officers, the court documents state, and he “did not have any real reasons for why he was flying the drone.”
NNPD officers then gave Mr. Shi the number for the local fire department and advised him to contact the department to get his drone out of the tree and stay on the scene, according to court documents. Eventually, Mr. Shi returned to his rental car an hour later and abandoned his drone.
On Jan. 7, the resident moved the drone to his shed for law enforcement after discovering that it had fallen from the tree, according to court documents.
The FBI seized the drone and discovered photos and videos inside the drone’s memory card.
The photos and videos appeared to “capture U.S. Naval vessels and/or vessels intended for use by the U.S. Navy that are drydocked at either of two defense contractors, Newport News Shipbuilding (‘NNSB’) in Newport News, Virginia and/or BAE Systems shipbuilding in Norfolk, Virginia,” according to the court documents.
The court documents noted that three commissioned submarines—the USS Boise, USS Columbus, and USS Montana—were located at NNSB on the day that Mr. Shi used his drone.
“Naval aircraft carriers have classified and sensitive systems throughout the carriers,” the court documents read. “The nuclear submarines present on that date also have highly classified and sensitive Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information (‘NNPI’) and those submarines even in the design and construction phase are sensitive and classified.”
Mr. Shi’s trial was initially set to begin on June 20; it’s now scheduled for July 8.
The schedule was reset because of the “unusual” nature of the case. The case’s judge, Magistrate Judge Lawrence R. Leonard of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote in a court document that “this case is so unusual based on the nature of the prosecution and the novel questions of both law and fact.”
Mr. Shi calls himself a “startup manager” on his LinkedIn page. He has a bachelor’s degree from China’s Jilin University and a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota. Between August 2020 and January 2021, he worked at the State Grid Corp. of China, a state-owned enterprise in China.
Mr. Shi’s lawyer and the Justice Department didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
