Two days after being released from jail after getting into a fight on his university’s campus, a 21-year-old Maryland man allegedly killed and then ate parts of his housemate, court records show.
Alexander Kinyua was being held without bail Friday at the Harford County Detention Center after being charged with first-degree murder, first-degree assault and second-degree assault in the alleged cannibalism case.
Harford County Sheriff Jesse Bane told reporters a day earlier that Kinyua admitted killing his housemate, cutting him up, and then eating his heart and part of his brain.
His public defender on Friday declined to answer questions about the case, according to his office.
According to the Harford County District Court case record, the killing occurred on May 25.
Six days earlier, Kinyua was involved in a fight on the Baltimore campus of Morgan State University, school spokesman Clint Coleman told CNN on Friday.
The fight led to charges against Kinyua, including first-degree assault and reckless endangerment, according to court records.
Noting the university’s no-tolerance policy against violence, Coleman said that after the incident, Kinyua was no longer considered an active student at Morgan State, even though he’d compiled enough credits to warrant beginning the fall semester as a senior.
Kinyua was detained and released from jail on May 23, according to records posted online by the state judiciary system.
It wasn’t until Tuesday that Antony Kinyua — Alexander Kinyua’s father — called a Harford County detective assigned to a missing person’s case and told him about a gruesome discovery made by another of his sons, the charging document states.
The other son explained to the detective how he had come across two metal tins covered by a blanket in the basement laundry room of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie’s residence in Joppatowne, which is about 20 miles northeast of Baltimore. He opened the tins and found a human head and two hands.
The brother said he “confronted (Alexander Kinyua), who denied the remains were human,” then went upstairs to get his father, the detective said in the charging document. When the father and son returned to the basement, “the items he observed were gone and … Alex Kinyua was cleaning the container he observed them in.”
Two Harford County detectives later arrived and discovered the head and hands on the home’s main floor.
“He admitted to killing our missing person, Mr. Kodie, and cutting him up with a knife,” Bane said. “He further stated that he consumed Mr. Kodie’s internal organs — specifically his heart and portions of his brain.”
The suspect told detectives to go to the parking lot of the nearby Town Baptist Church, where they could — and did — find the rest of Agyei-Kodie’s remains in a Dumpster.
A missing person’s report filed May 26 described Agyei-Kodie, 37, as “very intelligent.” He had earned multiple master’s degrees from schools in Ghana and was a graduate student at Morgan State University until 2008, according to Coleman.
Years after emigrating from Kenya as a 13-year-old in 2003, Kinyua was affiliated with the same state university in Baltimore.
Prior to the mid-May on-campus fight, “he was a student in very good academic standing,” Coleman said.
The engineering student was one of 175 people showcased in an August 2011 symposium run by the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory. His study focused on the cost-effectiveness and productivity of “comfort control” systems regulating heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
