The doctoral student charged with murdering four University of Idaho undergraduates displayed such troubling behaviour in the weeks around the killings that the university investigated his conduct around women, counselled him over a verbal altercation with a professor and ultimately fired him from his job as a teaching assistant, according to interviews and a university record.
Less than two weeks before the killings in November, the doctoral student, Bryan Kohberger, was called to a meeting with faculty members to discuss growing concerns about his behaviour, according to the record, a timeline the university prepared in justifying its decision to terminate him. The meeting was part of a series of discussions over Kohberger’s conduct during his criminology studies at Washington State University, which lies about seven miles (11.2km) west of the University of Idaho.
The faculty’s concerns with Kohberger grew in the weeks after the November 13 killings, though he had not yet been identified as a suspect. They culminated in the criminal justice department’s unusual decision to terminate Kohberger from his teaching assistant role in December, shortly before his arrest, according to three people familiar with his time at the university and a formal letter to Kohberger informing him that he had failed to meet the conditions required to maintain his funding under the programme.
The faculty made the decision at the department’s end-of-year meeting in December, during which professors were also told that some female students reported that Kohberger had made them feel uncomfortable. In one of those instances, Kohberger was accused of following a female student to her car, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the case.
In the case of the female students, the university’s investigation did not find Kohberger guilty of any wrongdoing, two people said, and it was other matters that prompted the decision to eliminate his funding and remove him from the teaching assistant job. That decision, they said, was based on his unsatisfactory performance as a teaching assistant, including his failure to meet the “norms of professional behaviour” in his interactions with the faculty.