Alexa Bartell, Zachary Kwak, Joseph Koenig, Nicholas Karol-Chik (Images via Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office)
The three teens charged with murdering Alexa Bartell with a “landscaping rock” as the 20-year-old spoke on the phone with a friend last week have officially been booked, photographed, and identified as high school seniors.
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado announced yesterday it made three arrests in Bartell’s death, a killing that law enforcement deemed first-degree “extreme indifference” murder. Joseph Edwin Koenig, Nicholas “Mitch” James Karol-Chik, and Zachary Kwak, each 18-year-old Arvada residents, stand accused of committing a rock-throwing spree on Wednesday, April 19, that robbed Bartell of her life.
CBS News Colorado reported that the defendants attend school at Ralston Valley High School, Standley Lake High School, online, though the report did not specify which teen is enrolled where.
When authorities first started investigating the case, they said that suspects “possibly from a vehicle or the side of the road, threw a large rock at the victim’s vehicle, which struck and killed her.” Investigators, who said they were possibly looking for a pickup truck, eventually tracked down a black 2016 Chevy Silverado believed to have been involved in the deadly crime spree.
The rock that smashed Bartell’s windshield and killed her sent the driver’s Chevy Spark off of the road, causing her to smash through a fence and come to a stop in a field. A friend was the last person to speak with her.
“In the moments before she was killed, Alexa was on her phone talking to a friend when the phone went silent,” the sheriff’s office said. “Alexa’s friend tracked her phone and drove to the location on Indiana St. She found Alexa fatally wounded inside her car, which was off the roadway in a field.”
The investigation quickly determined that there were several rock-throwing incidents on the night of Bartell’s death, as well as one after midnight on April 20. In at least four of those incidents, “landscaping rocks” described as larger than softballs smashed the windshields of vehicles.
“Overnight Tuesday, April 25 – Wednesday, April 26, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Investigators arrested three suspects in connection with the death of 20-year-old Alexa Bartell. Alexa was killed when a rock was thrown through her windshield as she was driving northbound in the 10600 block of Indiana Street at approximately 10:45 p.m. on Wednesday, April 19,” the sheriff’s office said. “Alexa’s vehicle was the last of a series of vehicles struck by large landscaping rocks in a spree that began shortly after 10:00 p.m. that night at 100th and Simms in Westminster.”
Authorities have credited “mobile device forensics and supporting information from the public.” According to the latest reporting, warrants of cell phone company data enabled “geofencing” investigators to place the suspects’ phones near the series of crime scenes.
In Colorado, first-degree murder by extreme indifference is committed when there are “circumstances evidencing an attitude of universal malice manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life generally” — when a defendant or defendants “engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to a person, or persons, other than himself, and thereby causes the death of another.”
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