Cannibalism suspect ordered to mental hospital

BALTIMORE (AP) — A Maryland judge has ordered a cannibalism suspect transferred to the state’s maximum-security psychiatric hospital for a competency evaluation, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Alexander Kinyua, 21, of Joppatowne was also indicted Tuesday on one count each of first-degree murder and carrying a weapon with intent to injure in the death of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, the Harford County state’s attorney’s office announced. Kinyua, a U.S. citizen originally from Kenya, told investigators last month that he killed the 37-year-old Ghanaian man, who had been staying with his family, and ate his heart and part of his brain, according to the sheriff’s office.

The indictment followed a hearing Monday where Kinyua’s public defenders requested the evaluation and District Court Judge Susan Hazlett ordered that he be transferred to Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, prosecutors said. Public defenders did not return calls for comment Tuesday. Perkins is Maryland’s only maximum-security psychiatric hospital.

A Baltimore grand jury indicted Kinyua last week on attempted murder and other charges in a separate attack on May 19 at his apartment at Morgan State University. The slaying at Kinyua’s family’s home in Harford County took place May 25. He previously faced assault charges in the in the dorm attack.

Joshua Ceasar said Kinyua hit him over the head with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire as he walked into the apartment, knocking him out. Friends who followed a blood trail from the door to a back room told Ceasar they discovered Kinyua standing over him with a knife and Kinyua fled, he said.

Ninety minutes after police were alerted, campus officers checking for witnesses stopped Kinyua as he walked toward them, according to reports recently released to The Associated Press. They detained Kinyua when he told them his name and said he was carrying brass knuckles and had stashed the bat in the woods.

Officers were not able to find the weapon that night, but a bat wrapped in barbed wire was found three days later, a day before he was released on bail.

After he learned details of the killing of Agyei-Kodie, Ceasar said he thinks Kinyua planned to kill and mutilate him.

Ceasar, his attorney and others have raised questions about whether the university should have looked more closely at Kinyua after a December outburst in which he punched the wall in a ROTC computer lab seven times and a January incident that included him making cryptic comments about “blood sacrifice” at a university forum. Kinyua was removed from the campus ROTC program after that outburst. A police report dated two days after that incident includes a ROTC instructor’s description of Kinyua as an unusually angry person and “a Virginia Tech waiting to happen.”

School spokesman Clinton Coleman has said the university is doing a “top-to-bottom” review, but so far it appears procedures were followed.

Kinyua told police officers that he punched the walls because of stress caused by finances and personal problems beyond his control. He told officers that the burn marks the instructor raised concerns about were tribal burn marks and also said “people don’t think I can defend myself.”

Officers noted that Kinyua didn’t display behavior that would require a psychological evaluation, but after their attempt to contact the counseling center’s emergency number failed, Kinyua was released to his father, a physics professor at the school. Coleman declined to speak about that any further, but said Kinyua was evaluated.