LOUISVILLE, KY. (WDRB/WKYT) — A former Campbellsville University wrestler who killed his teammate in a campus dorm room in 2024 was sentenced Thursday.
In Taylor County Court, a judge sentenced Charles Escalera to 40 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to murder last month. As part of the plea deal, two charges of burglary and theft by unlawful taking were dropped.
Escalera was 21 when he killed 18-year-old Josiah Kilman — a freshman Theology major from Columbia Falls, Montana — in his dorm room in February of 2024. Both men were on the university's wrestling team.
According to investigators, Kilman was found unresponsive just before 1 a.m. in his dorm and taken to Taylor Regional Hospital, where he later died. The Taylor County Coroner's Office said the cause of death was asphyxiation by manual strangulation.
Kentucky State Police officers arrested Escalera later that afternoon in connection to the murder after a local farmer found him hidden in his barn. Escalera spent the past two and a half years in jail awaiting his sentencing.
At the sentencing, the judge read more than 60 letters submitted by Kilman's family and friends, most of whom were back in Montana.
Kilman's parents watched the sentencing via Zoom, but a victim's advocate read a statement from Kilman’s mother during the hearing.
"Every moment I have shared things over and over again in my mind," the statement said. "I replay his life every single day. And I always will."
"If I could trade places I would in the blink of an eye. If I could just go back to that oh so terrible day and do things so differently," Escalera said.
While the judge said that a mental health crisis could have played a role in the killing, the motive and full circumstances of the murder were not disclosed.
