The family of Anna Kepner, the high school senior whose younger stepbrother is now suspected in her recent death aboard a Carnival cruise, is breaking their silence on the tragic situation.
Paternal grandmother Barbara Kepner told ABC News that the body of the 18-year-old cheerleader was found earlier this month, “concealed under the bed” in the Carnival Horizon stateroom she was sharing with the minor suspect and her biological brother.
Anna “was mechanically asphyxiated by other person(s),” according to the death certificate issued Monday and provided to the outlet by her family. Official autopsy and toxicology results are still pending, though there are no apparent signs of sexual assault.
“They were just like brother and sister,” Barbara said of the reported suspect, with whom Anna was like “two peas in a pod.” She added that the boy “was a good student,” who Barbara believes had “demons … in his past. And he was trying to deal with those.”
Nine members of the blended family — including Anna’s father and two siblings, her stepmother and her two children, and paternal grandfather, Jeffrey Kepner — were staying across three staterooms aboard the ship.
Though the stepbrother “was the only one seen coming and going” from the room they shared around the time of Anna’s death, Barbara feels she “can’t accuse him because I don’t know what happened in that room. But the summation would be that he did something.”
“I heard him, in his own words, say he does not remember what happened,” continued Barbara, who said she sat in on some of his interview with the FBI. “He was an emotional mess. He couldn’t even speak. He couldn’t believe what had happened.”
While no formal changes have been filed, Barbara said she’ll support “whatever the law says” if the stepbrother is indeed charged and convicted in Anna’s death.
“I’m not gonna advocate for anything more or anything less,” she said. “And that will be for the courts to decide.”
People reported last week that Kepner’s stepmother, Shauntel Hudson, had invoked her Fifth Amendment right in an unrelated custody battle with her ex-husband, and requested to postpone a hearing, worried that her testimony “could be prejudicial to her or her adolescent child in this pending criminal investigation.”
