A new report claims that the best friend of one of the murdered University of Idaho students was the one who found his friend stabbed to death in bed before calling 911 rather than either of the two surviving roommates in the house.
On Wednesday, NewsNation reported that Ethan Chapin was found dead in bed with his girlfriend Xana Kernodle by a longtime friend, who checked his pulse prior to calling 911, according to sources.
Twenty-year-old’s Chapin and Kernodle were killed on Nov. 13 in a knife attack along with friends, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, at their off-campus home is Moscow, Idaho.
Previously, it was reported that the phone of 21-year-old Dylan Mortensen, who survived the attack along with another roommate, Bethany Funke, was used to call the police almost eight hours after the slayings happened in the early hours of the morning.
While NewsNation withheld the name of Chapin’s best friend, the friend claimed they were the one who used Mortensen’s phone to make the call.
Mortensen had come face-to-face with the killer on the night of the murders, telling police that an unknown “figure clad in black clothing and a mask” had been seen walking past her, towards the back exit of the home around 4 a.m.
A police affidavit reads: “Mortensen described the figure as 5′ 10″ or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows. The male walked past [her] as she stood in a ‘frozen shock phase.’”
“The male walked towards the back sliding glass door. Mortensen locked herself in her room after seeing the male.”
The alarm was not raised to the police until eight hours later, allegedly due to the fact that Mortensen went into shock following the encounter.
“She was scared. She was scared to death, and rightly so,” Shanon Gray, a lawyer for victim Kaylee Goncalves’ family, told Fox News. “This guy had just murdered four people in the home.”
In December, over a month after the murders had taken place, police arrested Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University Pullman, following a multistate manhunt.
Kohberger was charged with the quadruple murder but has indicated he will plead not guilty when he is arraigned later this year.
Mortensen and Funke’s delay in notifying authorities puzzled investigators, an Idaho law enforcement source told the New York Post, saying police weren’t sure if it was “an issue of intoxication, or of fear.” Neither were ever considered to be suspects in the case.
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