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Survivor described Wichita killings

The Associated Press

Date: 12/18/00 23:12

WICHITA -- The woman, naked and bleeding, rang the doorbell frantically, waking the young couple inside the house. It was about 2:30 a.m. Friday.

"Help me, help me, help me," she said as they wrapped her in blankets. "We've all been shot. Three of my friends are dead."

She did not know that a fourth friend -- the man who wanted to marry her -- also would die.

The woman had walked about a mile through the bitter cold from the field where she and her friends had been shot, crossing Kansas 96, making her way through brush, around construction sites and a pond. The two people who took her in and called 911 said the woman had told a harrowing tale, which they recounted to The Wichita Eagle on condition that their names not be used.

The woman said she had been at her boyfriend's east Wichita town house with him, his two roommates and another young woman when two intruders burst in about 11 p.m. Thursday.

The intruders raped her, the woman said. They took her and her friends in two vehicles to automated-teller machines and forced them to withdraw money.

Then, she said, they were driven to a field and forced to kneel in front of one of the vehicles before being shot. The robbers, she said, drove away in her boyfriend's pickup.

Information the woman provided to police quickly led to the arrests of two brothers from Dodge City, ages 23 and 20. They were booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on suspicion of first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping.

The dead were Jason W. Befort, 26, a teacher and coach at Augusta High School and the intended fiance of the wounded woman; Bradley C. Heyka, 27, a Koch Industries employee; Aaron D. Sander, 29, a former Koch employee who wanted to become a priest; and Heather S. Muller, 25, a Wichita State University graduate student who worked at a church preschool.

Befort planned to give an engagement ring to his girlfriend before Christmas. Befort's best friend, Casey Carlson, said the woman had told him at the hospital that she had just seen the ring for the first time.

The robbers, she said, found the ring box and opened it. Befort told her: "That's for you. I was going to ask you to marry me."

Befort and the woman, also a teacher, were college sweethearts at Kansas State University.

Carlson said his buddy was the type who would do anything to help people.

"Countless times, he came over to my house to help move something around or put something together," he said. "He never said no. He was always there when you needed him."

Befort was an athletic star at Pratt High School as a quarterback for the football team in 1991 and 1992.

"Any kid who plays the quarterback position is a natural leader, and that's him," said his coach, Rich Anderson. "Always positive, always with a big, big smile on his face."

"I was thinking this morning ... anything I could tell you about Jason is going to sound too good to be true," Anderson said. "But that's him."

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