Police arrest man sought in deaths in Utah, Colo.
SALT LAKE CITY — A man sought in the fatal attempted carjacking of a University of Utah student and believed to be connected to the killing of a Colorado man was arrested Tuesday after he surrendered to authorities at a Salt Lake City library, police said.
Austin Boutain, 24, dodged a manhunt in the rugged foothills near campus for nearly 15 hours before his arrest miles away in the death of ChenWei Guo.
Guo, a 23-year-old student from China, was shot to death Monday evening during an attempted carjacking and found dead in his car in Red Butte Canyon on the edge of campus.
In addition, police in Golden, Colo., have said they want to question Boutain about the killing of a 63-year-old man whose pickup truck had been driven by Boutain in Utah. The body of Mitchell Bradford Ingle was found Tuesday in his trailer home in Colorado.
Authorities believe Boutain and his wife were friendly with Ingle and spent some time at the trailer home but aren’t sure how they met.
Kathleen Boutain, the suspect’s wife, also is a person of interest in the Colorado case. She was in custody in Utah on unrelated drug and theft charges. She was arrested after she reported to police Monday night that her husband had assaulted her while they were camping in the canyon.
Salt Lake City police dtective Greg Wilking said Austin Boutain apparently slipped a police containment line in the canyon after Guo was killed.
Boutain was arrested after he was spotted by a librarian at a downtown Salt Lake City library, about 4 miles away from the shooting scene.
“He basically just turned around and surrendered,” Salt Lake City police Chief Mike Brown said.
Brown and University of Utah police did not have details about how Boutain evaded police or where he had been since the shooting. He was being interrogated by investigators and was expected to be formally booked into jail later in the day, police said.
Guo, one of thousands of international students at the University of Utah, was a freshman from Beijing who came to the U.S. in 2012. He was a member of the Mormon church.
A lockdown at the university, which has about 32,800 students, ended early Tuesday and university officials canceled classes for the day.
An arrest record from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office showed Kathleen Boutain was being held on suspicion of three counts, including theft by receiving stolen property. She acknowledged to police that she was traveling in a stolen vehicle that had stolen firearms, according to arrest records.
Boutain served time in state prison as recently as last spring.
He was sentenced to five years in prison in November 2015 and paroled in May. Court records show he married Kathleen Boutain in March 2014 and the couple had two children.
Austin Boutain filed for divorce in January, citing his incarceration, but a judge has not yet issued a final order ending the marriage.
It wasn’t clear Tuesday where the couple’s children were living.