College KIL.LER Thinks He Can Get Away With It

By the time the police lights reached the edge of the woods, the night had already been broken apart by panic.

Somewhere beyond the cabin, beyond the porch, beyond the last patch of yellow light spilling from the windows, a young man had already been stabbed, carried by his friends, and left to fight for every breath he had left.

The people outside the cabin were soaked in blood, shaking, shouting over one another, and trying to make sense of a few terrible seconds that changed everything.

One car had fled into the darkness. One man was still missing. And one question was already hanging over the whole scene like smoke after a fire.

What exactly had happened in those final moments before Isaac Pence drove away? On the night of April 22nd, 2023, a birthday gathering in Hocking County, Ohio, was supposed to be nothing more than a crowded, loud, alcohol-soaked weekend in the woods.

The cabin had been rented for Dalton Flag’s 23rd birthday, and for a while, that was all it was.

Friends came and went. Family was there. Drinks were flowing. People packed into the rooms and spilled out onto the porch and the yard, the way young people do when they think the night is going to keep on stretching forever.

It was one of those gatherings where there is always music somewhere, always someone laughing too loudly, always someone insisting they are fine even when they are very clearly not fine at all.

Isaac Pence was there too, along with his girlfriend, Sabra. But from the start, he stood out.

Not in a good way. Several people later described him as belligerent, loud, and unstable, the kind of drunk who does not get quieter as the evening goes on, only more brittle.

Dalton, who had known enough about Isaac already to be on guard, tried repeatedly to keep things calm.

He warned Isaac to leave. He made it clear there was no reason for him to stay if he was going to keep pushing buttons and creating trouble.

Most people in that cabin probably wanted the same thing. They wanted the night to move forward without incident.

They wanted the birthday party to remain a birthday party. It did not. The cabin itself became part of the story because of where it sat, tucked away in the woods, surrounded by darkness and distance.

Help was not close. Police were not around the corner. If something went wrong, the people there would have to deal with it themselves until authorities could get through the roads and into the trees.

That isolation mattered later, because by the time anyone fully understood what had happened, Isaac was already gone.

The first violence began as a fight. Witnesses would later describe the scene in fragments: people arguing, bodies moving too fast to follow, a clash in the doorway and along the porch, shouting, pushing, and confusion piling on top of confusion.

Hannah, who had an EMS background, found herself watching the struggle with a kind of professional dread.

James, covered in blood by the time police arrived, would later say he tried not to get involved at first, because once a crowd starts closing in, no one can be sure who is fighting whom anymore.

What began as drunken conflict quickly turned into something much worse. According to the witnesses, Isaac got into the middle of the confrontation, backed toward his vehicle, then returned to it.

That detail mattered. It marked the moment when the fight stopped looking like a drunken scuffle and started becoming something more deliberate.

When Isaac went back to his car, no one at the party yet knew he was reaching for a knife.

They only knew that he had gone silent for a second, the kind of silence that makes people nervous before they can explain why.

Then he came back. Charles Starner was the one who ended up closest to Isaac’s car door, trying to keep him from getting back inside or leaving in the middle of the chaos.

What happened next was fast enough that many people only understood it after the fact.

Isaac pulled a knife and attacked Charles with brutal force. The wounds were later described as six separate stab wounds, including injuries to the neck and back.

Friends rushed in to pull Charles away. Someone tried to stop Isaac by kicking at the car door.

Others yelled for help. Some simply froze. The scene became a blur of movement and blood and fear.

Isaac climbed into his vehicle and sped off with Sabra. The woods swallowed the car almost immediately.

Charles remained behind, collapsing into the care of the people who had been at the party with him.

Hannah, who knew enough emergency medicine to do everything she could, tried to hold pressure on his wounds while others kept calling for help.

James, also covered in blood, stayed nearby as a witness, trying to make sense of the attack that had just unfolded inches away from him.

When paramedics finally arrived, there was no easy way to say what had already become clear.

Charles had been badly injured. The outcome was not going to be good. At the scene, detectives had one immediate problem and one immediate opportunity.

The problem was that nobody knew exactly how the attack had begun, who had what in their hands, or how the chaos had escalated so quickly.

The opportunity was that two people stood out almost instantly. Hannah and James were covered in blood, but not in the way a suspect usually would be.

Their injuries, their positions, and the patterns of the blood suggested that they were witnesses and responders, not the attacker.

Hannah’s arms were coated in blood because she had been trying to help Charles. James’s blood was smeared rather than spattered, consistent with someone who had been in the middle of the scene and dragged Charles out of harm’s way.

Detective Sumner and the other investigators separated the witnesses immediately and started asking questions. They needed the story from the people who had seen it happen, not from the man who had fled.

James described the fight inside the cabin, then the movement outside near the porch, and then the moment he heard someone yell about a gun.

Nobody knew yet if a gun had actually been involved, but the rumor was enough to heighten the fear.

When James said that Isaac had come back to his car and pulled something from the center console, detectives leaned in.

He believed Isaac had taken out a knife and stabbed Charles right there beside the car.

Hannah’s account added more detail. She said she had watched the escalation from the side, tried to stay out of it, then saw Isaac with the knife and saw the stabbing unfold in quick, violent motions.

She believed Isaac was aiming for vital areas. That mattered because the number of wounds, the force of the attack, and the repeated strikes told detectives they were not looking at an accident or a single desperate swing.

They were looking at intent. Before long, Dalton Flag was brought in to explain the night from the perspective of the hoSt. Dalton was not just the birthday hoSt. He was also Sabra’s brother, which meant the family history in the room had already been complicated before the first drink was poured.

Dalton explained that Isaac had no business being at the cabin in the first place.

He said Isaac had been unstable, had been told to leave, and had ignored repeated attempts to get him out before the situation got out of hand.

He also made clear that Isaac had a history of violence. He had put his hands on Sabra before.

He had also recently gone to jail for assaulting Dalton and Sabra’s mother. That detail reshaped the investigation.

If Isaac had already shown a pattern of violence, then his account of the fight might not be the honest self-defense story he wanted police to believe.

But detectives still needed more. They needed to know what Sabra saw, what Isaac said after the stabbing, where the knife went, and whether the two of them had tried to hide evidence.

And before the night was over, the cabin was locked down, the guests were moved, and the search for Isaac Pence moved from the woods to the phones and roadways around Hocking County.

Sabra’s mother was contacted, and more unsettling information surfaced. She described a home life shaped by fear, control, and abuse.

She explained that Sabra had been with Isaac for some time and that the relationship was already troubled.

The state of Isaac’s home would later make those concerns look even worse. Detectives would find a place that reeked of urine and ammonia, a house so filthy and neglected that the odor alone made the scene difficult to endure.

The children Isaac claimed so proudly in the interview were living in conditions that investigators would eventually describe as deplorable.

Meanwhile, Isaac and Sabra were on the move. Security footage would later reveal that after leaving the cabin, the couple made not just one stop but several.

First, they went to the home of Isaac’s friend Justin Sloan. The visit happened around 3:00 a.m., only minutes after the stabbing.

Justin later confirmed that Isaac and Sabra appeared frightened and agitated. He admitted they were there briefly, that Sabra was in the garage on the phone with her mother, and that Isaac was talking about what had happened in the woods.

Justin also said the pair had hidden knives there without his full knowledge. In other words, the murder weapons had been stashed before sunrise, and the panic had already begun to shape the cover-up.

After Justin would not or could not fully shelter them, Isaac and Sabra went to Sabra’s mother’s hotel room.

That detail would later matter because it helped establish just how quickly the couple had tried to move, hide, and manage the consequences of the stabbing.

Instead of calling police or seeking help, they spent the night shuttling between places and trying to keep the story from catching up to them.

Police brought Isaac in for his first interrogation and, almost immediately, he began constructing a story designed to fit self-defense.

He spoke about the birthday party as if he had been the one trying to leave peacefully.

He claimed that the others were the aggressors, that they were the ones who surrounded him, that they were the ones pushing and pulling and breaking apart the social order of the party.

He described a scene in which he felt cornered and overwhelmed. According to Isaac, when the crowd started coming at him, he pulled a knife simply to keep them back.

But his version had cracks in it from the beginning. Every witness who had already spoken to police described Isaac as the source of the trouble.

Dalton said he told Isaac to leave because he was drunk and acting out. Hannah and James both saw Isaac with the knife.

The video evidence would later show something even worse for Isaac’s defense. And yet in that first interview, he continued insisting that the others forced him into it.

He said he poked at people to make them back off. He said he only meant to get them away from his car.

He said he stabbed someone in the arm and that was enough to make everyone scatter.

It was not enough for detectives. They let him talk, because the more he talked, the more he exposed the shape of his lie.

He changed details, minimized the attack, and tried to walk back the number of times he stabbed Charles.

He insisted he was intoxicated, but not too intoxicated to drive. Not too intoxicated to hide the knife.

Not too intoxicated to leave with Sabra and figure out where to go next. By the end of the interview, investigators had what they needed.

Isaac had given a self-defense story that clashed with the witnesses, the timeline, and the physical evidence.

Then came Sabra’s interrogation. Sabra was difficult in a different way. She did not fight detectives as openly as Isaac had.

Instead, she tried to hold her story together with small omissions and soft denials. She described the night as if Isaac had mostly been trying to leave and the others had escalated things around him.

She said she believed he was not violent, especially toward women, and insisted he would never intentionally do something like that.

But the more she spoke, the more it became obvious she was defending him rather than describing the event truthfully.

At first, she said she had not seen the stabbing clearly. She said she was on the ground when things got out of control.

She said she did not know who had a gun. She said she did not realize Charles had been stabbed until after they were already leaving.

But detectives had already heard too much to believe she had no idea what was happening.

They knew she had been with Isaac at every stop after the stabbing. They knew about the knives at Justin’s house.

They knew she had been with him when he ran. They knew she had time to ask questions, but chose not to go to police.

Then the pressure tightened. Detectives confronted her about her children, about her mother, about how she would feel if someone killed a son and a daughter and then refused to tell the truth.

They made it clear that if she knew more than she was saying, she could end up facing charges herself.

Eventually, Sabra admitted that Isaac had gone to Justin’s house and hidden the knives there.

She admitted the couple had left together. She admitted Isaac had spoken in a panicked, angry way afterward.

But she still would not break fully. Even when she acknowledged the hidden knives and the troubled movements from one location to another, she refused to turn on him in the full sense detectives needed.

That still did not help Isaac. Because by then the evidence had already grown too strong.

One of the most important developments came when James returned with a video he had recorded during the chaos.

He had started filming because he feared Isaac might hit his car or continue the violence.

What he captured turned out to be the clearest evidence yet. The footage showed the scuffle, showed Sabra moving in the background, and showed Isaac in the car area during the crucial moments.

It did not look like the footage of a man simply trying to escape a crowd.

It looked like a man actively escalating the danger and then carrying it off with him.

The camera did what panic could not. It froze the scene. It preserved the shape of the attack.

It made Isaac’s story much harder to defend. Once detectives had the video, the witness statements, the physical evidence, and the location data from Sabra’s phone, they were able to move in.

Isaac and Sabra were located and detained. The car route was traced. The stops at Justin’s house and the hotel room were confirmed.

The knives were part of the chain of evidence. The timeline now fit together in a way that left almost no room for Isaac’s self-defense narrative.

Only after all of that did detectives return to Isaac for a final interrogation. This time they were ready.

They read him his Miranda rights and then began dismantling his story piece by piece.

They told him they had found contradictions. They told him they had interviewed nearly everyone at the cabin.

They told him they knew Charles had not been the aggressor, and that Isaac had not simply poked someone in warning.

They pressed him on the number of stab wounds, the location of the injuries, the fact that Charles had been struck in the neck, back, side, and face.

They asked him whether he understood that the man he attacked had been taken to the hospital and did not survive.

Isaac’s tone changed. He stopped sounding defiant and started sounding cornered. He still tried to insist he had only meant to make them stop.

He still claimed he was drunk. He still tried to make the crowd responsible for the way things unfolded.

But the detective confronting him had already built the story from the other side, and every fact was beginning to close in.

The officer told Isaac plainly that the truth mattered now because a father had lost his child and a young family had been left with nothing but a terrible memory and a long legal process ahead.

That finally pushed Isaac into the version detectives needed. He admitted to drinking heavily. He admitted he had been angry and jealous.

He admitted he had gone back to his car. He admitted he had pulled the knife.

He admitted the fight had been building the whole evening, and that when the crowd pressed in on him, he lashed out.

But even then, the self-protection did not hold. The wounds were too numerous, the locations too serious, the evidence too strong.

He had not simply swiped at someone to create space. He had attacked with deadly force.

The detective told him one more time what the law now believed. That he had killed Charles Starner.

That Sabra had obstructed justice. That the children in his home would be removed because the living conditions were unacceptable.

That the night he had tried to explain away as self-defense had actually become a murder case.

Isaac was arrested. By the end of the legal process, Sabra Flag would plead guilty on August 26th, 2024 to obstructing justice, a fifth-degree felony.

Isaac Pence would later be convicted of one count of murder, two counts of felonious assault, and one count of tampering with evidence.

On September 25th, 2024, he was sentenced to 18 years to life in prison. The sentence did not restore the night in the woods.

It did not bring back the birthday party that turned into an emergency scene. It did not erase the fear in the cabin, the blood on the porch, or the long drive into the dark.

But it did make one thing clear. Isaac’s version of events had collapsed under its own weight.

The witnesses had seen him. The video had captured him. The hidden knives had been traced.

The lies had been checked against the record, and the record did not move. What remained was the story of a young man who came to a birthday gathering drunk, angry, and already known for violence, and left behind a scene that forced everyone around him to become a witness.

Dalton tried to keep the peace. Hannah tried to save a life. James ran toward danger with a camera in his hand because he sensed the night was spiraling beyond control.

Sabra tried to protect the man beside her until the truth became impossible to contain.

And Charles Starner became the person whose final moments turned the whole case into something no one at that cabin could ever forget.

The woods around Hocking County eventually grew quiet again. The cabin stood empty. The birthday night ended the way so many terrible nights do, not with shouting, but with the heavy silence that follows once everyone has been forced to face what happened.

And somewhere behind all the confusion, the evidence, the interrogations, and the courtroom verdicts, one fact stayed unchanged from the beginning.

A college student went to a party expecting a normal night. He never made it home.