By Sarah Brumfield
Associated Press
BALTIMORE (AP) -- A Maryland college student accused of killing a housemate and eating his heart and part of his brain was kicked out of an ROTC program after he punched holes in the walls of the cadet computer lab and a military instructor referred to him as a "Virginia Tech waiting to happen," according to a campus police report months before the attack.
Alex Kinyua, 21, a native of Kenya and a student at Morgan State University, admitted using a knife to kill and carve up 37-year-old Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie before eating his organs, the Harford County Sheriff's Office said last week. The older man, a native of Ghana, had been staying with the Kinyua family for about six weeks at their townhouse in the Baltimore suburb of Joppatowne. Investigators haven't given a possible motive.
Two weeks before he was killed, he said he was ready to come home and get a job and dreamed of someday becoming president of his native land of Ghana, his relatives from that country told The Associated Press.
"Daddy is in a state of shock, does not want to believe his son is dead," Gloria Boahema Asante, the youngest of four siblings, said in an interview with the AP in Accra. "We look at the picture that went with the story and see the smiles on his face and do not want to believe that he is dead."
A Morgan State campus police report obtained by The Baltimore Sun said that after Kinyua's outburst in the classroom in December, Staff Sgt. Robert Edwards, a senior military instructor at the school, made the Virginia Tech comment.
The report to which the Sun referred to on Monday does not provide any rationale for the mention of the 2007 massacre in which 32 students were killed by a student who then committed suicide. The Virginia Tech gunman had been ruled a danger to himself during a court hearing in 2005 and was ordered to undergo outpatient mental health treatment.
Morgan State officials referred questions about the report to campus police, who did not provide it immediately to the AP.
The report does say Kinyua was barred from campus until a meeting with school officials and that two officers didn't think a psychological evaluation was needed, though one did call a counseling center emergency number. When they got no response, they released him to his father, physics professor Antony Kinyua. His father is who asked Agyei-Kodie to move in when he hadn't worked for three years and was trying to re-establish his life, said James Holt, a friend of the victim for about 10 years.
The report notes that Kinyua was kicked out of the school's ROTC program because of the outburst. ROTC officials have declined to discuss the reason why Kinyua was "disenrolled" in January in the college-based U.S. military program that allows students to be commissioned as officers when they graduate. Officials said Monday that Edwards was now deployed to Afghanistan.
In a January forum, Kinyua mentions Virginia Tech while advocating for a greater focus on protecting young men and women from university violence, according to a video released by the university. He then suggests the hazing policy include "blood sacrifice." It's not clear what he means and his short comment is met with applause from the crowd.
Virginia Tech was a subject again in his Facebook page posting in February. He referred to it 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."
And, 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 freed on $220,000 bail just days before Agyei-Kodie was killed. He is now being held without bond on a murder charge.
Grieving relatives last spoke to Agyei-Kodie when he called for Mother's Day, said his younger sister, Irene Konadu Asante, who was dressed in mourning clothes of red and black.
"We took turns to talk to him and he expressed his desire to return home within months. He even asked my husband to start looking for jobs for him," she said through tears. "My brother's dream is to become the president of Ghana and that is why he had spent so much time educating himself in the U.S."
Agyei-Kodie, the son of a retired banker, attended the prestigious St. Augustine's College at Cape Coast and went on to Presbyterian Boys Secondary School in Accra before graduating from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology with a degree in chemical engineering.
He had his problems in the U.S., though. He had studied at Morgan State, but not since 2008. He was sentenced to at least a year and a half in jail after a 2008 conviction in Baltimore County for sex offense, assault, harassment, stalking and telephone misuse for making repeated calls to a woman, according to court records. An immigration judge ordered him removed from the country in 2010, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was waiting for documents from Ghana before returning him to his country.
Agyei-Kodie maintained his innocence to the end and hoped to clear his name, Holt, his friend, told AP.
Gloria Konadu Asante recalled that her brother always "hammered" on the importance of education.
"Brother Kujoe is every little sister's dream of a big brother. He was always encouraging me to go to school and did all he could to help me in my education," she said. "Education would take you anywhere and (he) did everything to see me through university."
Published: Wed, Jun 6, 2012
