CHICAGO (AP) — Lawyers for a former University of Illinois student accused of killing Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang say university counselors didn’t offer him adequate care when he sought help for homicidal thoughts months before Zhang went missing.

In a filing unsealed this week, Brendt Christensen’s attorneys said he entered a campus counseling center in March 2017, saying he’d been “ruminating about how one might go about killing a person and ‘get away with it.'”

Defense attorneys want the trial judge to let a clinical psychologist tell jurors that the treatment Christensen received “did not comply with the applicable standards of care.”

Prosecutors say the claims would be inaccurate and irrelevant.

The Champaign-based school says counseling center staffers are trained to provide care “consistent with the best practices in mental health care nationally.”