SALT LAKE CITY — A gunman who killed a University of Utah student during a carjacking attempt also shot at a friend of the victim who witnessed the slaying that sparked a massive manhunt before the man was spotted by an alert librarian and arrested, police said Wednesday.
Suspect Austin Boutain, 24, who has also been linked to a killing in Colorado, told police he shot Chinese computer-science student ChenWei Guo and then fired two rounds at the woman as she ran away so there would be no witnesses, according to newly released jail booking documents.
The woman, a fellow student, wasn’t hurt but was so traumatized by the shooting that she has struggled to tell police what happened, said University of Utah police Chief Dale Brophy. Her name has not been released.
Boutain was booked Tuesday into the Salt Lake County jail on suspicion of aggravated murder, robbery and other charges as police traced the cross-country movements of the longtime criminal who was recently paroled from an Alabama prison. No attorney has been listed for him.
The booking records say Boutain told police he recently stole three guns from a home in Colorado. He said he hid a .44-caliber Ruger handgun used to shoot Guo in a crevice of a brick wall near the Salt Lake City homeless shelter, but when he returned it was gone.
He traded a second gun, a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson, for an ounce of marijuana, the jail documents state. The third, a rifle, was found by police at a makeshift camp were he’d been living near the university.
Police would not immediately say whether the weapons were taken from the home of Mitchell Ingle, a 63-year-old Golden, Colorado, man who was found dead Tuesday in his trailer.
Boutain and his wife were wanted for questioning in his death. Police have said they took Ingle’s pickup truck.
Boutain has a rap sheet that includes drug, car theft and weapons charges in Minnesota and Alabama dating back to his days as a juvenile.
He was paroled in May after serving a year and a half in an Alabama prison for being a convicted sex offender and failing to report his whereabouts to police.
His parole was transferred this spring to Wisconsin, where he has family, but he skipped and a warrant for his arrest was issued Aug. 31, about a week after he last checked in with his parole agent, according to authorities.
Boutain was arrested Tuesday after a Salt Lake City librarian spotted him at a library several miles from Red Butte Canyon, a rugged area near campus where Guo was found with his car.
Police say Guo, a devout Mormon from Beijing, was in the area popular with hikers with his friend when they encountered Boutain, who’d been staying in the makeshift camp with his wife in the canyon.
Kathleen Boutain went to campus Monday to report an assault by her husband. She was taken into custody on unrelated drug and theft charges.
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Associated Press writer Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.
Police in Utah say he acknowledged taking three guns from a home in Colorado. He told police he hid the gun used to shoot Guo in a wall near the Salt Lake City homeless shelter, but when he returned it was gone, according to jail documents.
Police said Mitchell Bradford Ingle, whose body was found Tuesday in his trailer home in Golden, may have been friendly with the Boutains, but it wasn’t clear how they met and how the older man was killed.
Kathleen Boutain was jailed in Utah on unrelated drug and theft charges after she reported to police Monday night that her husband had assaulted her while they were camping in the canyon.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown and University of Utah police did not have details Tuesday about how Boutain encountered Guo and evaded more than 100 officers who swarmed the foothills near campus after the shooting.
A lockdown at the university, which has about 32,800 students, ended early Tuesday, but school officials canceled classes for the day. About 175 students had to shelter in the library Monday night because they couldn’t return to their homes.
Lori McDonald, the University of Utah’s dean of students, said Guo served as a peer adviser to help other international students find their bearings on campus and described him as “extremely outgoing, charming, creative, smart.”
“This senseless act of violence has shaken our community and ended the life of a dear son, true friend, and promising scholar,” University of Utah President David Pershing said in a statement.
Guo served as a missionary in Provo and volunteered as a foreign language interpreter for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and recently persuaded his parents to join the church, Comrie said.
His friend, 24-year-old Rachel Tam of Pleasant Grove, Utah, said Guo baptized her cousin into the faith and would speak in a moving and powerful way about his beliefs.
Tam said Guo also wowed his friends on the dance floor with hip hop moves.
Austin Boutain’s mother, Roseanne Boutain, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that her family is “heartbroken for the victims and their families. We are sending out our heartfelt and earnest prayers.”
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Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price and Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City, Regina Garcia Cano in Las Vegas, Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama, Kathleen Foody in Denver, and Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
