Should a college student visiting a dorm be able to sue a university if a zombie-like cannibal who lives in the same dorm violently beats him with a baseball bat? What if the cannibal was arguably going to kill and eat the student and did, in fact, murder and dismember a man days later, then ate part of his brain and his heart?
That’s the quandary facing a Maryland state court as it sorts out a multimillion-dollar negligence claim filed by Joshua Ceasar, the student who suffered the attack, reports CBS Baltimore.
On Monday, the judge in the civil case ruled that the civil case can proceed, denying a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant, Morgan State University.
Alexander Kinyua, a U.S. citizen who came to the United States from Kenya when he was a child, was the attacker. He pleaded guilty to beating Ceasar but was found incompetent to stand trial and now resides indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital.
Kinyua, 22, beat Caesar with a baseball bat wrapped in chains and barbed wire in the spring of 2012 . Ceasar was hospitalized for a protracted period of time and now wears a large black eye patch because he was left blinded in his left eye.
A few days after the beating, while he was out on bail, Kinyua killed and cut up Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a man staying with his parents. Kinyua them ate part of the 37-year-old man’s brain and his heart.
“We are suing the university for its negligence on failing to exercise ordinary care and extract Kinyua from the campus,” Ceasar’s attorney Steve Silverman told the station. “We’re not suing Kinyua, so we’ve taken it a step further.”
Maryland’s attorney general’s office argued that the suit should be dismissed against Morgan State because Kinyua had no previous history of violent behavior. However, the judge found that there were enough potential warning signs to allow a negligence claim to continue.
Among the telltale indicators that Kinyua could become unhinged and act violently was an angry eruption in a computer lab. The outburst caused Kinyua to get kicked out of ROTC at the historically black college.
An instructor told police that Kinyua was “Virginia Tech waiting to happen,” reports the Daily Mail.
The reference is to a 2007 shooting on the Virginia Tech campus. Senior Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others.
In addition, the brain-eating electrical engineering major made macabre comments concerning “blood sacrifice” in front of school administrators.
In the days prior to Kinyua’s gruesome crime spree, he posted at least one bizarre, all-caps rant on Facebook, notes The Baltimore Sun. He wrote:
“HEAR ME OUT HBCU’ERS: ARE YOU STRONG ENOUGH TO ENDURE RITUAL HBCU MASS HUMAN SACRIFICES AROUND THE COUNTRY AND STILL BE ABLE TO FUNCTION AS HUMAN BEINGS? IT’S BEEN ALL TOO TRAGIC WITH THE DUAL UNIVERSITY SHOOTINGS AT VIRGINIA TECH, AND OTHER PAST UNIVERSITY KILLINGS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. NOW FOR A TWIST: ETHNIC CLEANSING IS THE POLICY, STRATEGY AND TACTICS THAT WILL AFFECT YOU, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY IN THE COMING MONTHS. THIS IS THE BRUTAL BASIS, AN EVIL & TERRIFYING METHOD OF THIS DEATH CULTS.”
The lurid Facebook page still appears to exist to this day.
A Morgan State spokesman told the Associated Press after the crimes that the school has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence.
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