One of two Idaho students who survived the November 2022 massacre at their shared house has now switched universities, her stepmother said, and is wracked with ‘survivor’s guilt’.
Dylan Mortensen, 21, told detectives that she saw a man leaving the house in Moscow, Idaho, in the early hours.
She did not realize until hours later that four of her roommates had been murdered.
Bryan Kohberger is in jail
Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology student, has been charged with four counts of murder, and pleaded not guilty.
He remains in jail, with no trial date set.
Mortensen left Moscow earlier this year, said Patricia Munroe, Mortensen’s stepmother.
Munroe was married to Mortensen’s father Brent, and helped raise Dylan from the age of seven until almost her graduation for high school.
She told The New York Post she remained close to the family, and Mortensen was ‘okay’.
Munroe, 53, said: ‘There’s a lot of guilt because, you know, if someone says, ”Oh, well, Dylan was so lucky,” you know, you don’t want to take on that luck — because all of the children deserved luck.
What Mortensen told police
‘They all deserved to be spared from that.’
Mortensen told police she stood in a ‘frozen shock phase’ as ‘a figure clad in black clothing and a mask walked towards her,’ then ‘towards the back sliding glass door’ and left the house.
She then locked herself in her room, and did not emerge until the next morning.
Mortensen and Bethany Funke, the other roommate who survived the attacks, did not call police until noon the next day, which has given rise to online trolls attacking Mortensen and Funke and claiming they were involved in the murders.
