BOISE, Idaho — Among the nearly 3,000 degrees the University of Idaho will award this week in Moscow, two will be awarded posthumously to victims of the slayings last year that shook the state.
Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves — two of the four students killed in the early morning of Nov. 13 — will receive posthumous degrees Saturday. Both were seniors.
Mogen’s degree will be in marketing, and Goncalves’ will be in general studies, according to a news release.
The two other victims — Ethan Chapin, a freshman, and Xana Kernodle, a junior — will receive certificates, which acknowledge credit toward degrees in progress. Chapin will receive a certificate in recreation, sport and tourism management, and Kernodle a certificate in marketing, according to the news release.
“That’ll re-stir some of the emotions around this,” Provost Torrey Lawrence told Idaho EdNews, “but we feel it is the right thing to do.”
The four university students were stabbed to death in the same off-campus house in November, which led to an extensive search for a perpetrator in the weeks that followed. In late December, Bryan Kohberger, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University, was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania and charged with killing the four students. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 26.
Another University of Idaho student, Guadalupe Ruiz, was killed in a car crash in August and will receive a posthumous degree in criminology, the release said.
House to be demolished
The house where the four students were killed is expected to be demolished, though there is no timetable for when it will happen, a university spokesperson, Jodi Walker, told the Idaho Statesman in an email. The property owner donated the house to the university. The university previously expected the demolition to happen by the end of the spring semester.
Walker said there is “not a plan of what will be done with the property afterward.”
Memorial garden to be designed in fall
The university plans to build an on-campus memorial garden in memory of the slain students. Called the Vandal Healing Garden and Memorial, Walker said it will be designed by students at the College of Art and Architecture in the fall.
People can submit suggestions for the garden on the university’s website throughout the summer.
The university has already raised more than $200,000 for the garden, Walker said.
