911 tape: Male victim"s mother found bodies underwater in bath
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
May 5, 2008
The tape of a call to Athens County 911 indicates that the mother of a Hocking College student, in town for Ohio University Mom’s Weekend, found her son and his OU student girlfriend dead in the bathtub of an apartment at Riverpark Towers early Saturday morning.
Athens Police Sunday evening identified the students as Christopher A. Theil, 22, of Dublin, Ohio, and Kelly P. Armbruster, 22, of Powell, a northwest suburb of Columbus. Theil was a first-year Hocking College student studying music and Armbruster a senior in OU's College of Business. Both students had attended Dublin-Scioto High School in the Columbus area.
Authorities have been slow to release information on the deaths of the two students, saying they’re awaiting autopsy and toxicological reports on the bodies to complete their investigation. Police have said, however, that they don’t suspect any third-party involvement in the deaths.
The Athens County 911 system released the tape on Monday afternoon, providing the first substantive information about the incident.
On the tape, a woman caller tells a dispatcher, “I need help... I think my son and his girlfriend have drowned themselves.”
As one after another dispatcher tries to get information out of the clearly distraught woman, she explains that she is “just down here visiting for Moms Weekend,” and doesn’t even know for sure what apartment complex she is in. At first, she suggests it may be the Athens Garden Apartments, but later describes the facility, allowing a dispatcher to identify it correctly as Riverpark Towers, a student apartment complex near OU’s South Green.
“I pulled my son and his girlfriend out of the bathtub,” she tells a dispatcher, later explaining that they were both under water.
In response to questioning, she states that she has checked her son and his girlfriend for breathing and pulse, and found neither.
She goes on to give her son’s name, and say that he was a student at Hocking College.
It is not clear from the contents of the tape whether the two students shared the apartment, though some comments of the mother seem to suggest that she had been staying there that night and had awoken to find the pair dead in the tub. Other reports indicated that Armbruster lived in the apartment, located on the fourth floor of Riverpark’s Building 35.
The woman called 911 from a cell phone based in the 614 area code, which she told a dispatcher was her company cell phone.
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