Laken went for a jog and never returned, her life brutally taken by someone who shouldn't have been in the country in the first place. Her body was callously hidden in a field, a story that echoes the sorrowful tale of Mollie Tibbetts, another young American whose life ended in a hauntingly similar manner.
Mollie's lawyer is now highlighting the eerie parallels between their cases. It begs the question—could there be a deeper link between the murders of Mollie and Laken?
From New York Post:
The lawyer for the Mexican national convicted in the 2018 murder of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts admitted that the migrant crisis is allowing people into the United States with “bad intentions” — and claimed there “absolutely” could be a connection between his client and Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s alleged murderer.
“Illegal immigration does come with an element of – well, problems,” Chad Frese told The Post this week, in the wake of Riley’s eerily similar murder.
Frese represented Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who kidnapped and murdered Tibbetts, a 20-year-old psychology major while she was on a run in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, about 70 miles east of Des Moines.
Over a month after Tibbetts went missing, Rivera led authorities to her corpse in a cornfield, where her body was found with up to 12 stab wounds, the state medical examiner said.
A jury found Rivera guilty of first-degree murder, and sentenced him to life in prison in August 2021.
“With any immigration, legal or illegal, you’re going to have some people who come here with bad intentions,” Frese said.
The Iowa-based attorney called the “bizarre parallels” between Tibbetts’ murder and that of Riley – an Augusta University student who was killed on the University of Georgia campus while out on a run on Feb. 22 – “staggering.
And he said it “wouldn’t surprise” him if their murderers were somehow connected.
“We’ll have locals who immigrate to the central Iowa area, who have come from the Georgia area, or move to the Georgia area. So it’s not atypical to have a Mexican national living in the central Iowa area working at a packing plant, who previously lived in East Point, Georgia, for instance.
So, what's driving the belief in a connection? It might boil down to societal or cultural patterns.
Consider this: individuals gravitate towards familiar environments, places where they feel at ease. Additionally, these heinous acts are crimes of "opportunity." These predators are on the lookout for their next victims—innocent young women simply going about their daily lives. It underscores a stark reality: our government has a duty to protect its citizens by preventing these dangerous individuals from entering our country. Our young women are unknowingly being made vulnerable, targeted by those lying in wait.
