Suspect in student deaths brought to Idaho
BOISE – The 21-year-old man accused of killing a University of Idaho student and under investigation in the separate slaying of a Boise State University student was extradited from Nevada to Idaho on Saturday.
John Joseph Delling was being held in the Ada County Jail in Boise after being driven from Sparks, Nev. He is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of University of Idaho student David Boss in Moscow on March 31.
Police also suspect him in the slaying of Meridian resident and Boise State University student Bradley Morse in Boise a few days later, and the March 20 shooting of University of Arizona student Jacob Thompson. Thompson survived the attack outside his home in Tucson, Ariz.
“Obviously, he’s a high-profile inmate, so we’ll take the precautions that we need to make sure he’s safe,” Ada County sheriff’s Lt. Scott Johnson said Saturday. “We don’t want him injured by another inmate, or him injuring anyone else.”
Family members and court documents suggest that Delling struggled with mental illness.
Police believe that may also explain why he allegedly made a 6,500-mile Western road trip that left the two university students dead in Idaho and the other recuperating in Arizona.
Delling, Boss and Thompson attended Timberline High School together. Morse went to school in nearby Meridian at about the same time.
Delling apparently worried that people were trying to steal his “powers,” according to court documents.
His brother, Eric Delling, said during a visit at their parents’ home in Antelope, Calif., John Delling became agitated and destructive when talking about his energy loss, Moscow police reports show.
At one point he asked Eric, “Do you think David (Boss) is the one stealing my powers?”
As a University of Idaho student in 2004 and 2005, Delling reportedly told dorm students that people were stealing his powers and that killing them was the only way to stop them, according to court documents. He was eventually kicked out of the school.
Assistant Moscow Police Chief David Duke told the Lewiston Tribune that Delling’s talk of someone stealing his power could be a motive and that detectives there were examining that angle.
Authorities have had difficulty establishing a possible motive for the attacks.
“He wasn’t so much an outcast as he just wasn’t really in with the in crowd,” in school, Johnson said last week. “We just don’t know if he had any close friends. By some accounts, the two people he shot were the nicest to him.”
On Saturday, Johnson declined to comment about any possible motive concerning Delling’s mental state.