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Murder In Moscow: Bryan Kohberger And The Arrest When He Was 19
Published 2 hours ago
Description
Nine years before Bryan Kohberger was arrested in connection with the murders of four University of Idaho students, he had been arrested in Pennsylvania on a misdemeanor theft charge involving his own family. According to court records, Kohberger was 19 years old in February 2014 when his father, Michael Kohberger, contacted police and reported that Bryan had taken his sister Melissa’s iPhone, which was valued at roughly $400. Michael told authorities that Bryan had recently returned home after leaving a rehabilitation center and had been struggling with drug addiction. Kohberger allegedly paid a friend $20 to drive him to a shopping mall, where he sold the stolen phone at an automated electronics kiosk for approximately $200. Records showed that Kohberger was charged with misdemeanor theft but served no jail time, and the public record of the arrest and its ultimate disposition was later no longer available, potentially because Pennsylvania’s first-time-offender program allowed qualifying charges to be dismissed and records expunged after successful completion of probation.
The revelation became another part of investigators’ effort to reconstruct Kohberger’s life and behavior as prosecutors prepared their murder case against him. Former law-enforcement officials cautioned that a teenage, nonviolent theft from a family member could not simply be treated as a direct precursor to four homicides, particularly because nearly nine years separated the two events. Instead, they said investigators would have wanted to build a broader behavioral timeline showing what Kohberger had done from adolescence through adulthood and whether the 2014 incident fit into any larger pattern. Former acquaintances also described Kohberger as having struggled significantly with drugs during his teenage years, with one former friend saying she had driven him places without initially realizing he was obtaining heroin. The 2014 arrest therefore did not establish any connection to the Moscow murders, but it provided investigators and prosecutors with another piece of Kohberger’s personal history as they examined his background, relationships and behavior leading up to the November 2022 killings.
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source:
Idaho college killings suspect was first arrested in 2014, records show - ABC News (go.com)