Act Daily News
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Since the November slayings of 4 University of Idaho college students, Ben Mogen says he has been going by way of life “one day at a time.”
It’s all he can do.
His daughter, 21-year-old Madison Mogen – a brilliant, bubbly woman that cherished to observe stay music with him – was among the many victims, together with Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.
“It’s just so surreal,” Mogen instructed Act Daily News’s Anderson Cooper Friday night time, describing what the weeks since dropping his daughter have been like. “Maddie,” as she was affectionately identified, was getting ready to graduate faculty with a business diploma, and once they celebrated their final Fourth of July collectively over the summer time, Mogen was pleased with her and curious to see what she would go on to do subsequent.
“She could have done anything she wanted to,” he mentioned. “She was so bright and so good with people and just had a magnetic personality.”
His feedback come a day after the 28-year-old man accused of killing the scholars appeared in court docket and a decide scheduled a preliminary possible trigger listening to to start in June. Bryan Kohberger, who’s dealing with 4 counts of first-degree homicide and a cost of housebreaking, waived his proper to a speedy possible trigger listening to inside 14 days and spoke solely briefly to reply the decide’s questions. The decide ordered the suspect stay remanded in state custody with out bond.
Kohberger has been held in an Idaho jail since final week, following his extradition from Pennsylvania, the place he was arrested in late December. He has not entered a plea.
The slain college students have been every stabbed a number of instances within the early hours of November 13 at an off-campus home within the small faculty city of Moscow. In the weeks because the quadruple murder – which rattled the close by neighborhood and despatched shock waves throughout the nation – authorities shared little particulars concerning the investigation however continued to affirm they have been making progress within the case.
Since Kohberger’s arrest, an affidavit launched final week provided a have a look at each the investigative work that went into figuring out the suspect and a few grim particulars concerning the night time of the crime.
But Mogen, Maddie’s father, mentioned aside from the updates he’s been receiving frequently from authorities and later the prosecutor’s workplace, he has not saved up with the small print circulating on-line concerning the case.
“It’s too painful,” he mentioned. “As far as reading or watching (the news), I can’t really do it.”
Instead, he thinks concerning the reminiscences they shared: the final photograph they snapped collectively over the summer time, the stay music they’d usually like to observe, the way in which she performed together with her youthful cousins throughout household gatherings.
“We all miss Maddie so much,” Mogen mentioned. “It’s hard.”
“But we’re surviving.”