CNN
—
The mother of one of four college students killed near the University of Idaho last month has expressed disappointment in police communications about the status of the murder investigation.
“It’s sleepless nights. You have an upset stomach. It’s just kept in the dark,” said Kristi Goncalves, mother of 21-year-old victim Kaylee Goncalves ) said in an interview aired Thursday on NBC’s Today show.
Gonsalves recounted the day she learned about her daughter’s accident.
“We ran for hours and just didn’t know what was going on, what was going on,” she explained. “…we found out through someone who called us. About three hours later, the sheriff showed up.”
She also described information about police interest in a white Hyundai sedan seen in the area around the time of the murder, which she learned not from investigators but from a press release someone else sent her of.
The Moscow police department said at a news conference on Thursday that authorities were sorting out tens of thousands of registered vehicles that met the criteria for vehicles found near the residence on the night of the attack.
“So far, we have a list of approximately 22,000 registered Hyundai Elantras in white that meet the criteria we are screening,” Chief James Fry said in a video update. “We believe that one or more occupants of the vehicle possessed information critical to this investigation.”
Gonsalves said the family learned vivid details of her daughter’s autopsy when a woman from the coroner’s office called to ask her 17-year-old daughter if she wanted to know the results of the autopsy.
“She asked, are you sure you want to know this? And my daughter, thinking she did it for some reason, agreed. She went ahead and told her.”
The Latta County Coroner’s Office could not immediately be reached for comment.
The early morning killings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, 20, on the morning of Nov. 13 rocked the college town of Moscow, Idaho, which has not been recorded since 2015 over murder.