The father of University of Idaho murder victim Kaylee Goncalves refused to even enter the courtroom Wednesday as his daughter’s killer pleaded guilty — after saying the deal failed his daughter.
“I’m not going in there,” Steve Goncalves said, as the rest of his family entered court.
Kaylee, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Ethan Chapin were best friends and roommates in life. But the plea deal for killer Bryan Kohberger is dividing their families.
Kaylee’s kin and Kernodle’s family have expressed outrage that justice is not being properly served — specifically that Kohberger likely won’t have to explain his motive of why he targeted the four coeds.
The families of Mogen and Chapin, meanwhile, praised the deal — saying it spares the families the worst of a lengthy trial.
Gonclaves made his stand surrounded by reporters outside the courthouse in Boise moments before Kohberger was to finalize his plea.
“You betrayed us,” the Gonclaves family said in a new statement to Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson on Wednesday.
“This ain’t justice, no justice presided, no jury weighed the truth. Thompson robbed us of our day in court.”
Kernodle’s father told The New York Times that he does “not agree” with the plea deal, which he said he expressed to prosecutors.
“After nearly three years of waiting and being told there would be a trial, with evidence presented to convict him, I’m disappointed in the prosecutors’ decision,” he told the Times in a statement.
Kernodle’s aunt had said earlier this week that the prosecution told them that it was to “spare” them from the reliving grisly details of the murders prosecutors would present to the jury at trial to obtain a conviction.
“We know the graphics. They were not trying to spare us,” Kernodle said.
Mogen’s father, meanwhile, said his family was dreading the upcoming trial and were relieved by the prosecution’s move to strike a deal that he believes is fair.
“It’s been this nightmare that’s approaching in our heads,” Ben Mogen told The New York Times he expressed to prosecutors when they mentioned working on a deal last week
Mogen added that even if the state were to secure a death penalty, Kohberger would likely spend years on death row before his execution.
And death, he argued, is a more lenient punishment because “you don’t have to spend decades thinking about how terrible you made the world,” he told CBS.
The Mogen family wants “to put this behind us and not have these future dates and future things that we don’t want to have to be at, that we shouldn’t have to be at, that have to do with this terrible person,” he said.
“We get to just think about the rest of lives and have to try and figure out how to do it without Maddie and the rest of the kids,” Mogen added.
Chapin’s mother, Stacy Chapin, told KHQ-TV that the family would be in court on Wednesday “in support of the plea bargain.”
The Goncalves family, in stark contrast, said in a scathing statement shared on social media on Monday that they are “beyond furious at the State of Idaho.”
Her family members vowed they will “not stop fighting for the life that was stolen unjustly,” in a follow-up statement on Tuesday.
“At a bare minimum, please – require a full confession, full accountability, location of the murder weapon, confirmation the defendant acted alone, & the true facts of what happened that night.”
The plea bargain also sparked backlash online, with the Latah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s inundated with negative Google reviews following news of the deal.
Kohberger, a 30-year-old former Ph.D. criminology student, hacked to death Goncalves, 21, Mogen, 21, Chapin, 20, and Kernodle, 20, at their off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022.
However despite troves of evidence, with no trial, we may never learn the Kohberger’s true motive behind the senseless slayings.
Kohberger was a student at Washington State University in Pullman, just about 10 miles from where the victims’ bodies were discovered.
