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A prison call between the illegal alien accused of murdering Laken Riley and his wife was enough to convince one former law enforcement official of the man’s presence at the scene of the crime.

Following the February murder of the 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student, the trial of 26-year-old Venezuelan national Jose Ibarra began on Friday at the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse. After the first day had included audio of the 911 call that captured the harrowing final moments of the victim, a call played Monday had the suspect’s wife expressing doubts.

“She said that she thinks it’s crazy that they don’t have anyone else’s DNA. They only have his. And she says she doesn’t understand how someone can see someone dying and not calling [sic] 911,” FBI analyst Abeisis Ramirez told the court as she translated the conversation between Ibarra and his wife, Layling Franco, which was in Spanish.

“What happened with the girl?” she was said to have asked as Ibarra replied, “Layling, enough.”

Reacting to the testimony, Fox News contributor Paul Mauro, a former executive officer with the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Operations and Analysis Bureau, said, “She very clearly doesn’t believe him…She says, at one point, ‘Jose, I know you,’ a very…telling moment,” the former NYPD officer contended. “And then at one point…the real crushing statement is when she says to him, ‘I can’t believe somebody could see somebody dying and not call 911.’”

He went on to express his belief that the call seems to “be a reference to him having told her, I was there, I saw the body, but I didn’t call 911, and I didn’t do it.”

Additional testimony from an FBI agent detailed by the Associated Press made note of images of Ibarra recovered after phones were seized from the apartment he had been living at with his two brothers as well as two other people, as it became known that the suspect had been flown into the country courtesy of a humanitarian flight provided by the Biden-Harris administration.

The outfit the suspect was photographed wearing that day appeared to match footage that showed a man discarding a jacket into a dumpster. After an officer had testified Friday that a dark hooded jacket that had been found in the trash tested positive for traces of Riley’s blood, Rosbeli Elisbar Flores Bello, who had met Ibarra’s brother Diego in Queens, New York before joining him in Georgia, testified Monday that the man throwing the jacket away was Jose Ibarra.

Referring to bodycam footage from the University of Georgia Police Department’s interaction with Ibarra, Mauro said, “The most interesting thing, I thought, was actually the most prosaic, which is the fact that [Riley] has fingernail scrapings — she had skin under her fingernails — from fighting for her life, and Jose had injuries with having gotten those injuries from that kind of a fight.”

Ibarra had contended to UGA PD patrol Cp. Rafael Sayan, according to the officer’s testimony Monday, that the scratches were related to the cold February weather.

“This is speculation, but I suspect he was likely highly [intoxicated],” contended Mauro who made note of a white plastic cup found at the scene of the murder that smelled of alcohol.

Ibarra faces 10 charges which include one count of malice murder, three counts of felony murder, and individual counts of aggravated assault, aggravated battery, kidnapping, tampering with evidence, hindering an emergency telephone call, and being a peeping Tom.

Kevin Haggerty
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