Alexa Bartell (image provided by, First Judicial District Attorney’s Office) Nicholas Karol-Chik (Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office mug shot)
The second domino has fallen in the prosecutions of three high school seniors facing charges in the rock-throwing death of a 20-year-old driver who was on the phone with a friend that fateful night, as one of the three teens has pleaded guilty to murder.
Nicholas “Mitch” Karol-Chik, 19, decided to plead guilty on Wednesday to second-degree murder, avoiding a possible first-degree murder conviction at trial but nonetheless agreeing to serve at least 35 years in state prison and as many as 48 years behind bars for killing Alexa Bartell, the Denver Post reported.
The plea agreement reportedly acknowledges that Karol-Chik was a passenger in the front seat of his Chevrolet Silverado when he handed co-defendant and driver Joseph Koenig, 19, a large “landscaping rock” that Koenig allegedly used to smash Bartell’s windshield, sending her Chevy Spark “off the roadway” and into a field, killing her.
Karol-Chik reportedly admitted not only to joining in on attacks that injured three other drivers and smashed seven cars that night, but also to late February 2023 and early April 2023 attacks with the same drive-by-rock-throwing modus operandi.
“Regarding all of these incidents, Defendant Karol-Chik knowingly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death, under circumstances evidencing an attitude of universal malice manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life,” prosecutors in the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office said, according to CBS Colorado. Karol-Chik could face even more prison time for the charge of criminal attempt to commit first-degree murder, the report said.
The move from Karol-Chik came five days after co-defendant Zachary Hiestand Kwak, now 19, pleaded guilty to three assault charges, one of them a first-degree assault on Bartell and two second-degree counts for attacks on three other victims.
Zachary Kwak, Joseph Koenig (Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office mug shots)
Though he did not plead guilty to murder, Kwak will nonetheless face 20 to 32 years in prison, prosecutors announced.
“On Apr. 19, 2023, between the hours of approximately 10:00 pm and 10:45 pm, seven vehicles were hit by rocks in Jefferson and Boulder Counties. Tragically, Alexa Bartell lost her life, and three others were injured,” prosecutors said. “As part of today’s plea, Kwak agreed that with regard to the death of Bartell, the defendant acted knowingly, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life, by engaging in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”
In October, a deputy sheriff who led the murder probe revealed at a hearing that Alexa Bartell died of “massive trauma to the head,” but the investigator was not able to say which of the three teen suspects actually threw the rock that killed her.
“There was biological matter on the roadway,” Daniel Manka testified.
The deputy sheriff said that the evidence showed the defendants did not just attack Bartell but carried out a rock-throwing spree, and that “landscaping rocks” larger than a softball were the weapons of choice. It was further alleged that after the murder the suspected perps turned their pickup truck around and took a photo of Alexa Bartell’s car as a “memento.”
Before a break in the proceedings, Manka testified the teen suspects were traveling at 80 mph before one of them threw the landscaping rock that killed Bartell.
Notably, an attorney for Joseph Koenig attempted to push back by suggesting that co-defendant Kwak’s statements about what happened that night were not to be trusted, highlighting a particular statement Kwak allegedly made to law enforcement: “At this point, I’m trying to save my ass.”
But judging by Karol-Chik’s guilty plea, Kwak wasn’t lying when he identified Koenig as the rock-throwing driver and Karol-Chik as the front-seat passenger.
Unlike Karol-Chik and Kwak, Koenig is still on track for a late July trial, but given the two guilty pleas of his cooperating co-defendants, he’s in the position of having to choose between decades in prison, like Kwak and Karol-Chik, or risking life in prison without parole by taking a first-degree “extreme indifference” murder case to trial.
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