WASHINGTON — A freshman at Gallaudet University, the nation's only liberal arts university for the deaf, was charged Tuesday with killing two fellow students over the past five months.
Police Chief Charles Ramsey said robbery was the motive in both killings.
He said Joseph M. Mesa Jr., 20, of Barrigada, Guam, was expected to be arraigned Wednesday on two counts of felony murder in the deaths of Benjamin Varner and Eric F. Plunkett.
The students were killed in the dormitory next to the one where Mesa lived. Police searched Mesa's dorm room earlier in the day, but Ramsey would not say whether any evidence was recovered.
"A lot of what we'd like to say we can't say because of the pending trial, but this was one of the more complicated investigations I've seen in my 30 years," Ramsey said at a news conference at the university Tuesday night.
Police revealed earlier in the investigation that they had recovered a bloodstained jacket and a knife in a trash bin behind a dormitory.
Ramsey said Mesa had visible injuries and that will be used against him in court. Investigators felt that Varner's attacker had been injured during the slaying.
"There's a sense of relief in knowing someone's been arrested and charged with these terrible crimes," said I. King Jordan, the university's president. "At the same time, there's a real sense of sadness that the individual that is said to be responsible is from our community."
Varner, 19, of San Antonio, was found dead of multiple stab wounds Feb. 3 in a fourth-floor dorm room of Cogswell Hall. Plunkett, 19, of Burnsville, Minn., also a freshman, was found beaten to death in a first-floor room of the same dorm on Sept. 28.
The killings shocked the close-knit community of 2,000 students at Gallaudet, which was established by Congress in 1864 as the country's only four-year liberal arts university for the deaf and hearing impaired.
Security has been tight at the campus since Varner's death. University police had been checking student IDs and writing down the license plates of vehicles entering the campus.
After Varner's death, university officials decided to close Cogswell Hall for the rest of the semester.
Police and university officials briefed students before telling reporters about the arrest.
Ramsey said another Gallaudet student, Thomas Minch, 18 of Greenland, N.H., who was arrested five days after Plunkett's death but later released, has been cleared of suspicion.
Varner was buried last Friday in San Antonio.