“Smash! Smash! Suh-MASH!” Kai the hatchet-wielding hitchhiker made those some of the most memorable words of the year. You’ll recall that he was re-telling the incident which jettisoned him – reluctantly into the public spotlight. In February, Kai McGillvary intervened when a woman was being attacked. He stopped the attacker with a hatchet he happened to have handy, an act which immediately he was a well-known media sensation.
Twenty four year-old Kai’s fame very recently took a tragic turn. He was arrested when a Philadelphia Starbucks employee recognized him as the suspect in the beating death of a New Jersey lawyer 73-year-old Joseph Galfy Jr. Kai McGillvary was arrested Thursday in Philadelphia and charged with his murder.
The unlikely pair met amid the neon lights of Times Square over the weekend and headed back to the squat brick home of 73-year-old Joseph Galfy Jr. on a quiet cul-de-sac, authorities say. On Monday, Galfy was found beaten to death in his bedroom, wearing only his socks and underwear. Kai was known to surf on sofas throughout his travels, but the place of the meeting and circumstances may lend credence to a Facebook entry on Tuesday morning, that implied that a sexual assault may have occurred.
Before cutting his hair and heading to the Greyhound depot, Kai’s last post on Tuesday asks “What would you do?” “If you awoke in a stranger’s house and found you’d been drugged and sexually assaulted.” He went on to describe having a metallic taste in his mouth, and being physically sick at the sight of bodily fluids on his face. Bail has been set at $3 million dollars.