Moscow murder victim’s family to sue university Bryan Kohberger attended
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- A Moscow victim’s family will sue Washington State University seeking financial damages.
- Kohberger pleaded guilty and is serving multiple life terms without a chance of parole.
- Families previously sent tort claims to WSU, the U of I, state police and city of Moscow.
At least one of the families of the four victims in the Moscow college student murders plans to sue the nearby university where the man who admitted to the killings attended graduate school.
Steve and Kristi Goncalves, the parents of victim Kaylee Goncalves, intend to file a tort claim seeking damages from Washington State University, according to their attorney, Shanon Gray. Bryan Kohberger, the man who confessed to fatally stabbing their 21-year-old daughter and three of her friends, attended WSU as a first-year Ph.D. student of criminal justice and criminology.
“We filed this lawsuit to seek accountability and transparency from Washington State University,” the Goncalves family said in a statement. “Our goal is to understand what went wrong, to ensure that no other family endures the same tragedy, and to honor the memory of those who were lost. We trust the legal process to uncover the truth.”
The other three victims were Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20. All four students who died were undergraduates at the University of Idaho and killed in the middle of the night at an off-campus home in Moscow in November 2022. Kohberger pleaded guilty this summer to their murders in a deal to avoid the chance of the death penalty and need for a trial.
Last week marked the three-year anniversary of the four U of I students’ deaths.
Kohberger, who turns 31 this week, is serving consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole at the state’s maximum security prison south of Boise. He was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in fines and fees, including about $32,000 in restitution and $20,000 in civil damages to the victims’ families.
Gray filed tort notices on behalf of the Goncalves family, as well as the Laramie family — Mogen’s mother and stepfather — against WSU in May 2023, the Idaho Statesman previously reported. The action reserved the families’ right to seek civil damages if they eventually decided to sue.
At the time, the two families also sent tort notices to the U of I, Idaho State Police and the city of Moscow. Following Kohberger’s sentencing, the Laramies and the Chapin family prevailed in a lawsuit against Moscow to stop the release of crime scene photos through public records requests that revealed any part of their children’s murders.
It is not yet clear whether any of the other victims’ families plan to join the Goncalveses’ civil lawsuit or separately sue WSU. It’s also unclear how much money the Goncalveses are pursuing in their lawsuit, which has yet to be publicly filed.
“Those questions are still being worked out,” Steve Goncalves said in a text message to the Statesman.
Gray did not respond to a question about when the tort claim will be filed. His clients’ plans to sue WSU were first reported by NewsNation.
WSU spokesperson Pam Scott declined to comment in detail, citing the impending lawsuit. Instead, WSU President Elizabeth Cantwell, who took the helm of the university in April, extended her condolences to all those left behind in the wake of the deaths of the four students’ from the neighboring university 8 miles east over the Idaho state line.
“My heart goes out to the families, friends, and entire community grieving this tragic loss of life,” Cantwell said in a statement to the Statesman. “We share in their sorrow and we recognize the profound pain and shock that this act of violence has caused.”
This story was originally published November 19, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
