‘Something’s wrong.’ Friends heard on Moscow homicides 911 call talk for first time
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- Two friends who found the Idaho homicide victims spoke publicly for the first time.
- Friends who appear in an Amazon docuseries want to humanize victims beyond the crime.
- Suspect Bryan Kohberger faces a summer trial with the state pursuing the death penalty.
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Plea deal reached in 2022 killings of four U of I students
Bryan Kohberger, suspect of killing University of Idaho students in Moscow, Idaho, agrees to a deal in exchange for no death penalty.
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Two University of Idaho students who discovered the bodies of their four friends after they were killed in their Moscow home spoke out for the first time Monday in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt at the time had arrived to help two surviving roommates check the off-campus house, and can be heard talking with the dispatcher on the call made to 911 just before noon. Johnson told the morning program he wore shorts and sandals to the King Road house, not expecting to stay very long.
“I would say as soon as you get there, you know something’s wrong,” Johnson said. He added that he felt God was with him in that moment, lending him the strength to get through that day.
Kohberger, 30, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary stemming from the students’ deaths in November 2022. Prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty if Kohberger was convicted. He accepted a plea deal, which took capital punishment off the table in exchange for pleading guilty to the four murder charges, according to a Monday letter written by prosecutors to victims’ families and obtained by the Idaho Statesman.
At the time, he was a Ph.D. student in Washington State University’s criminal justice and criminology department, living just over the Idaho state line from Moscow in Pullman, Washington.
The victims were U of I seniors Madison Mogan and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21; junior Xana Kernodle, 20; and freshman Ethan Chapin, 20. The three women lived in the off-campus home with two female roommates who went unharmed in the attack, while Chapin was Kernodle’s boyfriend and stayed over for the night.
Johnson and Alandt, who are dating, are set to appear in a forthcoming four-part docuseries called “One Night in Idaho,” which is set to begin streaming on Amazon Prime on July 11. It acts as a companion to a new book by James Patterson and Vicky Ward called “The Idaho Four” that comes out July 14.
“Good Morning America” also revealed that a fifth person, friend Josie Lauteren, also was there when Johnson found Chapin and Kernodle’s bodies in her room on the second floor of the home.
“As soon as I stepped in the house, I was like, ‘Op, something is so not right.’ Like, you could feel it almost,” Lauteren said in a clip from the docuseries.
As police arrived, the group sat outside and waited for several hours for more information and direction from officers.
“We watched the ambulance come and we watched them immediately leave, so,” Alandt said. “That was a hard … part, for sure.”
Moscow Fire Chief Brian Nickerson previously told the Statesman that a fire engine and ambulance were dispatched to the King Road house, but none of the members of his volunteer department entered the home. The 911 call reported an unconscious person in the home.
“We weren’t there very long,” Nickerson said by phone the day after the students’ deaths. “The (police department) was there prior to us arriving, so we determined we didn’t need to do anything at that point.”
After news of the homicides spread nationally, Johnson and Alandt left town to ensure their own safety. Johnson began receiving online threats, including those who urged him to confess to the stabbing deaths of his four friends, he said in his interview with “Good Morning America.”
“I felt like I was less than a person in that point of my life,” Johnson said.
Convictions for Kohberger still wouldn’t feel like true justice after the loss of their four friends, Alandt said.
“Who they are as people is so much more than ‘The Idaho Four,’ ” she said. “They shouldn’t be known as ‘The Idaho Four’ and they shouldn’t be attached to the name of who did that to them.
“I just think that hopefully one day that they’re just seen as who they are and not what happened to them.”
This story was originally published June 30, 2025 at 11:23 AM with the headline "‘Something’s wrong.’ Friends heard on Moscow homicides 911 call talk for first time."
