On Monday, a coroner noted that manual strangulation was the manner of death in which a student found in his dorm room had died.
18-year-old Josiah Malachi Kilman, a freshman wrestler, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm room. This was at Campbellsville University in Kentucky, at about 12:43 a.m. Saturday.
An autopsy found that the student, from Montana, had died from asphyxia after being manually strangled.
On Saturday night, 21-year-old Charles Escalara, another student at the university, was apprehended for murder in relation to Kilman’s death.
Escalara, who goes by the name “Zeke,” had been a part of the school’s wrestling team from 2021 to 2022.
Authorities began to look for him after Kilman was discovered deceased. At about 5 p.m., Escalara was found after someone had reported a suspicious person in a barn. He was then taken into custody.
Escalara was placed in the Taylor County Detention Center and charged with murder and second-degree burglary. His bond was set at $2 million.
As of now, authorities don’t have a motive, and an investigation is continuing.
Relatives of Kilman say that he was a “beautiful, young, 18 year old Christian man…who had a passionate heart on fire for the Lord.” He had been attending the school on a biblical scholarship “with dreams of leading others to follow the Lord through the Christian principles, of which he himself adhered to,” they added.
