After pleading not guilty, Xuming Li was deported to China by ICE — effectively putting his case on pause.
The chemistry student accused of injecting a “chemical agent” underneath the front door of his upstairs neighbor’s apartment is no longer in the country.
While Xuming Li pleaded not guilty to multiple accounts of battery and possession of a controlled substance, he was not in court for a planned hearing earlier this week.
“ICE deported him before the hearing,” a spokesperson for the 13th Judicial Circuit state’s attorney’s office told Law&Crime. “The judge issued a capias warrant, which essentially means if he were to ever try to enter the country again, he would face those charges again. Technically, it will remain a pending case in our office because if he were to enter the country again, he would face the charges.”
Li was out on bail when he was deported, with his lawyer telling USA Today his deportation means the case “will, essentially, be on pause unless or until he returns to the States.”
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According to Umar Abdullah, via FOX 13 Tampa Bay, he began getting complaints from his neighbor below him, Li, over noise after the birth of his daughter in August 2022. He told the outlet the complaints would be over anything from footsteps to drawers closing, while texts viewed by WFLA also allegedly showed Li say he couldn’t sleep and could “hear the toilet seat being moved.”
Following the complaints came a mysterious odor in Abdullah’s apartment, he said, telling FOX that his eyes started to burn and his daughter began coughing and throwing up. The smell — which he described as more “obnoxious” than nail polish remover — prompted the father to try and find a source for it inside their apartment, with Abdullah saying he eventually replaced the water heater, called the fire department for assistance and cleaned all the vents and air ducts, all to no avail.
Eventually, he noticed a crack in his doorway and decided to install a hidden camera in a plant outside their apartment … checking the footage after his daughter again fell ill.
“I installed a hidden camera outside because we were suspecting someone is tampering our place from outside and then we caught our neighbor injecting something through our door,” Abdullah told FOX. “On June 27, I found that our neighbor is coming with a syringe, he’s pulling something from a vial and then he’s injecting through our entry door.”
Video shared from Abdullah to the outlet appears to show just that. See the raw footage here.
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“If we could not have found that incident on the camera, probably after a few days we might have been just dead,” he told FOX — while also telling WFLA he and his family “were shaking” when they made the discovery. “We can’t imagine that he is coming and doing something,” he added.
Abdullah then called the police on Li, who was arrested June 27 and released shortly after. At the time his case first made headlines, his lawyer told WFLA that “all the facts will come out in due course of time.”
According to FOX, Li was recently a chemistry PhD student at USF, but the school said he was no longer enrolled there. WFLA, citing a Tampa Police Department affidavit, said a hazmat test found the liquid “chemical agent” contained both methadone and hydrocodone.
“If people use their knowledge, this extreme knowledge to harm people, they could be even more dangerous,” Abdullah told FOX. “I can never expect a neighbor … to expect something that to happen. I wish no one else would have to go through a situation like this ever in their life.”
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