A 22-year-old honors student at the federally funded L.A. Job Corps was jailed for allegedly stabbing his counselor to death at the program's iconic Hollywood dorms yesterday afternoon.

LAPD officials and witnesses tell reporters that Freddy Levya was inside an office with program adviser Dwayne Alexander, 48, when he attacked the well-liked Job Corps staffer…

… stabbing him multiple times in the head and elsewhere.

Other live-in students at the crime scene described Alexander, better known among his counselees as Mr. A, as a “great guy” and a “father figure.”

The suspect is viewed in a much different light. A student named Jonathan Whitney tells CBS2 that Leyva “didn't even talk to them,” and “was actually causing more trouble in the last couple of days than anything else.” Former student Alex Osuna adds to ABC7 that “he was being a little nasty, a little weird lately.”

L.A. Job Corps is a vocational training program that's free to students. It's funded by Congress and overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor. According to the national Job Corps website, its mission is to “help young people ages 16 through 24 improve the quality of their lives through vocational and academic training.” More from the site:

Job Corps has been training young adults for meaningful careers since 1964. Job Corps is committed to offering all students a safe, drug-free environment where they can take advantage of the resources provided.

Job Corps' mission is to attract eligible young people, teach them the skills they need to become employable and independent, and place them in meaningful jobs or further education.

Ironically, the L.A. location (whose headquarters are located on Broadway downtown) says it's currently looking for an on-call “Center Protection Officer.”

The corps' honors students live at the Hollywood Studio Club, famous for housing female celebrities like Marilyn Monroe in its early-20th century stint as a YWCA dormitory. These glamorous “barracks” are situated along Lodi Place, near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery:


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The Los Angeles Times reports that Leyva may have been “having a hard time adjusting to the highly structured and disciplined training center.”

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