The last known video of 21-year-old Ally Kostial alive has been released by the City of Oxford. Authorities said Kostial was found shot eight times in on Saturday, 20 miles from the Ole Miss campus, where she was a student.
The video footage is from last Friday night. It shows Kostial leaving a bar and walking down a sidewalk in Oxford, Mississippi. The victim was shot eight times in her stomach. Authorities found her near Sardis Lake.
Brandon Theesfeld, 22, is the suspect in this case. He has been charged with murder.
Investigators said they tracked him down to South Memphis, Tennessee, using his credit card and cellphone information. His clothes appeared bloody, law enforcement sources told Fox 13 Memphis. They also recovered a weapon, they said.
Theesfeld lawyered up, and his father insisted on the defendant’s innocence.
“I know my son is innocent,” Daniel Theesfeld told WMC in a statement. “And I have reasons to believe that I can’t share anything now. But I would ask everybody to please give him the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.”
Students who apparently knew them both, however, tell a different story. In an oft-reported tweet, an apparent friend of Kostial claimed the Brandon Theesfeld “harassed” and “took advantage” of Ally for year.
One of Theesfeld’s former neighbors, Rex Ravita, spoke out about the suspect, calling him misogynistic and a “daddy’s boy.”
“I’m not going to sugar coat it,” Ravita told KMOV. “He was pretty much a daddy’s boy type, constantly had to reference his father’s money, how his dad could get him out of anything–Just that attitude all the time. Any type of vulgar comment he could say, any type of rude comment to anybody in our dorm, any of the women.”
Ravita, who reportedly lived in the same dorm as Theesfeld for a year, said the defendant and Kostial dated on and off for several years.
“Of course it was surprising because I knew him and of the situation, but to hear that the circumstances of how and why it happened, it just all clicked and made sense,” Ravita said.
Ally Kostial was taking summer courses and teaching fitness classes at the time of her death. She was staying on Ole Miss’s campus over the summer. Authorities quickly determined that “foul play was involved” in her death.
Theesfeld was arrested on Monday in connection with Kostial’s death and was booked in the Lafayette County Detention Center. He made his first court appearance on Tuesday.
Alberto Luperon and Matt Clibanoff contributed to this report.
[Image via the City of Oxford]
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