[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
The story of 18-year-old Anna Kepner’s final days has only grown more heartbreaking as new allegations emerge from those who loved her most.
What was meant to be a family getaway on a massive Carnival cruise ship has spiraled into a national tragedy amid her tragic and untimely death by murder, as we’ve been reporting. And now those closest to Anna are sharing chilling accounts of what they claim was a long-brewing situation that left the high school cheerleader terrified in her very own home.
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In the days following Anna’s death, her ex-boyfriend Joshua Tew stepped forward with allegations that paint a disturbing picture of Anna’s 16-year-old stepbrother, who is now under investigation in connection with her death.
In comments made to multiple media outlets at a memorial for Kepner at the Grove Church in Titusville, Florida, Joshua claimed he personally witnessed an incident nine months prior to her passing that had left Anna feeling shaken and afraid. During a late-night FaceTime call, Joshua claimed he saw the late teenager’s 16-year-old stepbrother enter Anna’s room and attempt something that instantly set off alarms for him.
Tew claimed:
“Anna was laying down and he walked in there and tried to get on top of her, but he got caught by me in the process of it.”
WHAT?!
According to Tew, he confronted the step-brother teen right then and there via FaceTime, which then sparked a frantic escape through the house. Joshua said the teen bolted as soon as he realized he’d been seen, racing down the hallway while Joshua shouted after him:
“I was like, ‘What the hell are you doing in her room?’ Then he got scared and ran away. And I heard his footsteps running through the house because he got caught.”
Joshua’s father, Steven Westin, also spoke to reporters. He claimed that his son immediately told him what he saw after it happened. Westin also insisted that Anna’s stepbrother had supposedly become fixated on her and was allegedly pursuing her in a way that made her uncomfortable long before the family ever left on the cruise.
According to Westin, who spoke to Inside Edition about it, Anna was “scared of him [her stepbrother] because he always carried around a big knife.”
Creepy AF.
Westin echoed what Joshua had claimed about the FaceTime incident, too. And the disturbed dad also said that his son described the stepbrother as intensely fixated on Anna in a way that went far beyond anything normal for newly-blended siblings:
“He’s, like, infatuated. Attracted to her like crazy. He always wanted to date her.”
Despite the seriousness of these allegations, Joshua and his dad claimed Anna felt like she couldn’t speak up.
Her father Christopher had remarried quickly, and adjusting to the new family dynamic seemed overwhelming for her, they said. Thus, Joshua claimed Anna feared upsetting her father and/or her new stepmother Shauntel — who has three kids from a previous marriage, including the 16-year-old being investigated in the cheerleader’s death — and felt trapped in a situation she didn’t choose.
He said:
“She was too scared to tell anybody because that one time that he said if she said anything about getting on top of her he’d do something to her. She told me that she was uncomfortable with them [her step relatives] being at the house because she didn’t fully know who they were.”
Joshua added that Anna allegedly struggled with the rapid changes at home and evidently didn’t feel entirely safe around her new stepfamily:
“That their dad had just met this woman, not even like a year ago, and she doesn’t really like [Anna]. She has an attitude most of the time and was very controlling over [Kepner]. But I told her, ‘they’re going to be your parents at the end of the day.’”
The ex-boyfriend claimed it got so bad that Anna often stayed with friends instead of sleeping at home because she felt so uneasy around her stepbrother.
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And then came the cruise. According to Joshua, a younger sibling who was sharing the cruise cabin with Anna and the 16-year-old heard a terrifying fight and was locked out of the room the night before Anna’s body was discovered. That fight, Tew claimed, included yelling and the sound of furniture being thrown:
“[He] heard him yelling at her in a harmful way, like, ‘Shut the hell up,’ and stuff like that. And that’s when he knew something was going on. There was something going on. Something was banging around, like chairs were getting thrown around in the room. But he wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He said the FBI told them that if they talk they’ll get arrested because it’s tampering with an investigation or something.”
Whoa…
Anna’s body was found the next morning hidden under her bed, wrapped in a blanket, and covered with life vests. The discovery shocked the entire ship and devastated her family. As questions multiplied in the days that followed, federal investigators boarded the vessel and the family’s fractures burst into public view, revealing just how turbulent the months before the cruise had been.
Her biological mother, Heather, has said she wasn’t even informed of her daughter’s death by the family. Instead, she claimed to have found out by searching online. She claimed she also wasn’t permitted to attend the funeral, due to tensions with Anna’s father and stepmother.
Now, as investigators review ship footage, interview witnesses, and consider potential charges, the 16-year-old stepbrother has been moved to an undisclosed location amid the ongoing investigation, per the US Sun. Meanwhile, the ship’s crew is cooperating fully with authorities.
Whether the horrifying allegations surrounding that stepbrother’s behavior will ever come to be confirmed — or be determined to have played a role in this tragic outcome — remains to be seen.
But regardless, what a truly awful story…
For more information on violence against women, go to https://www.justice.gov/ovw/resources-for-survivors.
[Image via Anna Kepner/Instagram]
