Alexander Kinyua pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he killed a family friend with an ax and ate his heart, and a Harford County judge found the defendant not criminally responsible for the act because of mental illness.
The decision means Kinyua, 22, will not be sent to prison for the Joppa killing. Instead, Kinyua will remain committed to a mental health facility indefinitely, unless a judge finds that he is healthy and no longer dangerous.
Those close to 37-year-old victim Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie questioned how long Kinyua would be held, telling prosecutors they could derive little comfort from the resolution. On Monday prosecutors described grisly details, including a charred serving dish in which Kinyua’s brother said he had seen dismembered hands.
Percess Veronica Mattison, a close family friend, described “startling moments of stark disbelief” in the circumstances of Agyei-Kodie’s death.
“Alexander did not impulsively commit the crime,” she said in court. “He prepared Kujoe for consumption.”
Kinyua, a former Morgan State University student, pleaded guilty but not criminally responsible to first-degree murder in the 2012 killing. He had been released from jail just days before the killing on charges that he partially blinded a fellow student by hitting him with a baseball bat.
In that assault case, Kinyua also pleaded guilty and was found not criminally responsible. A judge in December agreed with a psychiatric assessment that determined Kinyua was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time and believed reptilian aliens were going to destroy the Earth.
Officials released few specifics Monday about their assessment of his mental state at the time of the murder. After the hearing, Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said the state found he was not in control of his actions in the murder case and that he had no option but to accept that conclusion.
“We really had no evidence, no testimony or opinion from other medical personnel that would dispute the findings of the doctors” at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital, the state facility where Kinyua is being held, he said.
Agyei-Kodie’s friends and realtives felt “a great sense of emptiness” after Kinyua’s plea, Cassilly said.
“They kind of feel like nothing really happened today,” he said, adding that they had questions about how long Kinyua would be committed.
Kinyua’s brother, Jarrod, told deputies that he had seen human hands in the pan, but they were gone, Smith said. Kinyua interrupted and said that what his brother had seen was a fox he had caught and tried to cook. Police found a metal cage and plastic tub with a decaying animal in the backyard, according to Smith.
Kinyua’s brother told them he had found human hands and a skull in two stacked metal containers under a blanket in the laundry room. After the brother went to get his father, Jarrod found Kinyua cleaning a metal container with Pine Sol, Smith said.
Police eventually discovered two human hands and a head on the home’s main floor. Kinyua later told police he had killed Agyei-Kodie with an ax while he was sleeping, dismembered him, and then ate his heart and placed the arms, legs and torso in a garbage bin outside a church.
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