BOISE, Idaho — Friends and relatives of the four University of Idaho students murdered in their rental home by Bryan Kohberger delivered powerful statements of love, anguish and condemnation as his sentencing hearing began Wednesday.
“This world was a better place with her in it,” Scott Laramie, the stepfather of Madison Mogen, told the court. ”Karen and I are ordinary people, but we lived extraordinary lives because we had Maddie.”
Dylan Mortenson, a roommate who told police of seeing a strange man with bushy eyebrows and a ski mask in the home that night, sobbed as she described how Kohberger, seated across the room in an orange jumpsuit, “took the light they carried into each room.”
“He is a hollow vessel, something less than human,” Mortenson said. “A body without empathy without remorse.”
Mortenson and another surviving roommate, Bethany Funke, described crippling panic attacks and anxiety after the attack.
“I