Surviving roommates in the University of Idaho massacre were reportedly awake and texting during the murders, according to the father of one of the victims.
Two roommates inside the off-campus Moscow home in November were said to be on their phones in bed while four victims were fatally stabbed inside the residence, allegedly by suspected killer, Bryan Kohberger.
“Yet Steve had been told that the two survivors allegedly had not only been awake while the killings had taken place but that they had heard everything,” Steve Goncalves, father of victim Kaylee Goncalves, told AirMail.
“More astonishingly, his grand-jury sources alleged that the two girls had been texting one another as the murderer methodically went from one room to the next.”
As CrimeOnline previously reported, Kohberger, a Ph.D. criminal justice student at Washington State University, was arrested in December in Pennsylvania for fatally stabbing Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, and Kaylee Goncalves at the an off-campus home on November 13, 2022.
He is believed to have turned off his phone during the murders. However, police claim he visited the area 12 times before the slayings.
Police arrested the defendant after a cross-country trip with his father from Idaho to Pennsylvania. During their trip, Indiana police pulled over the pair twice.
The information provided by Steve Goncalves has not been verified, due to an ongoing gag order in the case. In the weeks following the murders, however, police have said that the surviving victims inside the residence had been sleeping while the killings occurred.
“Detectives believe that on November 12th, the two surviving roommates had also been out in the Moscow community, separately, but returned home by 1 a.m. on November 13th. The two did not wake up until later that morning,” Moscow Police Department said in November 2022.
Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary. Prosecutors filed court documents detailing their intent to pursue the death penalty as they deemed the four slayings were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.”
Kohberger remains jailed without bail.
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[Featured image: Bryan Kohberger enters the courtroom for a motion hearing regarding a gag order, Friday, June 9, 2023, in Latah County District Court in Moscow, Idaho. A judge overseeing the case against Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, is set to hear arguments over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters. (Zach Wilkinson/Moscow-Pullman Daily News via AP, Pool)]
