The college student suspected of killing and eating parts of a man staying at his home ranted months ago about “mass human sacrifices” on Facebook, one of several details that emerged on Friday in the second gruesome case of alleged cannibalism in the US in a week.
Authorities say Alex Kinyua, 21, admitted using a knife to kill and carve up Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, before eating his heart and parts of his brain. The older man had been staying with the Kinyua family for about six weeks at their townhouse in the Baltimore suburb of Joppatowne.
The remains have been positively identified as Agyei-Kodie’s and a relative in the US has been notified, Hartford County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Monica Worrell said. No other charges have been filed against anyone else, she said.
Both the victim and his alleged killer had attended nearby Morgan State University, an historically black university in Baltimore. Kinyua had just finished his junior year, and Agyei-Kodie was a graduate student who last attended classes in 2008. Both men were also originally from Africa; Kinyua, a US citizen, moved from Kenya as a child and Agyei-Kodie was from Ghana.
Investigators have not given a possible motive in the slaying. In a separate case on May 19, police said Kinyua beat a man with a baseball bat on Morgan State’s campus, fracturing his skull and making him lose sight in one eye.
Kinyua was free on US$220,000 bail in that case. He is now being held without bond on a murder charge.
Kinyua, an electrical engineering student, had a very good grade point average and had enough credits to be a senior in the fall, according to university spokesman Clinton Coleman. He could not comment on the incident, but said the university has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence and a student in such a situation would likely be suspended or expelled.
No students or faculty had approached the school with concerns about Kinyua, Coleman said.
In February, Kinyua posted a question on Facebook, asking fellow students at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) if they were “strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function as human beings?”
He referred to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech and “other past university killings around the country” and warned “ethnic cleansing is the policy, strategy and tactics that will affect you, directly or indirectly in the coming months.”
Kinyua wrote on his page that he attended Morgan State and was a member of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) affiliated military honor society at the university, the National Society of Pershing Rifles. ROTC is a college-based US military program that allows students to be commissioned as officers when they graduate.
The page was linked to an Internet radio show called Warrior Syndicate Radio, which displayed a photograph of Kinyua in green-and-white face paint. A Twitter account linked to him also had nonsensical and repetitive Tweets that ended in February.
Lieutenant Colonel James Lewis, a professor of military science at Morgan State and the head of the ROTC program, said on Friday that Kinyua participated in ROTC for two-and-a-half years, but was “disenrolled” in January. He could not say why.
James Holt, a friend of the victim for about 10 years, said that Agyei-Kodie had met Antony Kinyua, the father of his alleged killer, while pursuing a doctorate. Antony Kinyua is a physics lecturer at Morgan State.
A spokeswoman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said Agyei-Kodie came to the US on a student visa, but was not in compliance with the visa’s terms. He was ordered removed from the country by an immigration judge in 2010 and was under ICE’s supervision pending removal to Ghana. The agency had been waiting for documents from Ghana before returning him to the country.
Holt said the Kinyua family took in Agyei-Kodie when he had not worked for three years and was trying to re-establish his life.
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