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Wearing a plaid, button-down shirt and headphones, Jose Ibarra looked ahead and listened to an interpreter translate from English to Spanish as a friend of Laken Riley’s took the witness stand at the illegal alien’s trial for her murder.
“How would you describe your relationship with Laken?” a prosecuting attorney asked Lilly Steiner on Friday morning in an Athens, Georgia, courtroom.
“We were roommates, but the term ‘roommates’ is an overgeneralization of our relationship,” Steiner answered.
“Our house was like a little family, and we called each other our family,” she testified, adding that the slain nursing student brought “a sense of joy to all of our lives that has been missing ever since.”
On the morning of Feb. 22, Riley left her home and went for a run along a wooded trail on the Athens campus of her alma mater, the University of Georgia, but never returned. The body of the Augusta University nursing student was found hours later, and authorities determined she had died from blunt force trauma and suffocation.
Ibarra, an illegal alien from Venezuela, is on trial for Riley’s murder.
“On Feb. 22, Jose Ibarra put on a black hat, a hoodie-style jacket, and some black, kitchen-style disposable gloves and he went hunting for females on the University of Georgia’s campus,” prosecuting attorney Sheila Ross said in her opening statement. “And in his hunt, he encountered 22-year-old Laken Riley on her morning jog. And when Laken Riley refused to be his rape victim, he bashed her skull in with a rock repeatedly.”
In an email Friday to The Daily Signal, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, blamed the crime on the Biden-Harris administration.
“Laken Riley’s killer, Jose Ibarra, was able to perpetrate his vicious, shocking crimes because the Biden-Harris administration released him into the interior instead of swiftly removing him after he illegally crossed our Southwest border,” Green wrote, naming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Sadly, stories like Laken’s have been repeated across this country since January 2021, thanks to [their] casual disregard for our immigration laws,” Green said.
Ibarra, 26, first crossed into America as an illegal immigrant in 2022, according to officials. Ibarra was arrested last year in New York on charges of child endangerment, but was released before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could ask local law enforcement to hold him.
Steiner, Riley’s roommate, explained to the court that she was among the first to recognize her friend might be in trouble that February morning.
Riley, Steiner, and their other roommates used the location-sharing application on their cellphones to continually have access to each other’s location.
On that Thursday morning, Steiner checked to see where Riley was after waking up to find her friend not at home. The app showed that Riley was on a nearby trail she often ran on, but checking it a little over an hour later, Steiner saw that Riley’s location had not changed.
Another hour later, Steiner and Sofia Magana, a third roommate, went to look for their friend on the running trail.
The young women, accompanied by Magana’s dog, found a single AirPod that they believed belonged to their roommate, but they didn’t find Riley. They called the police. Authorities found Riley’s visibly injured body in the woods early that afternoon.
“The evidence will show that Laken fought,” prosecutor Ross argued. “She fought for her life, she fought for her dignity.”
“And in that fight, she caused this defendant to leave forensic evidence behind,” Ross added, pointing at Ibarra.
Ross, representing the state of Georgia, said Ibarra’s DNA was found under Riley’s fingernails and one of his fingerprints was found on her iPhone.
One of Ibarra’s defense attorneys, Dustin Kirby, began his opening statement with condolences to Riley’s family. Kirby acknowledged that Riley was tragically killed, but insisted the evidence linking Ibarra to the nursing student’s murder is “circumstantial.”
Kirby called into question the “proprietary software” used to test DNA found at the crime scene. He said prosecutors will point to a supposed hole in one of Ibarra’s gloves that left the fingerprint on Riley’s phone, but argued that the hole wouldn’t allow for such a mark.
A third roommate of Riley’s, Connolly Huth, took the stand later Friday morning, telling the court she often accompanied Riley on her runs. Huth was in class the morning Riley went for a run and didn’t return home.
Huth testified that she received multiple calls from Riley’s sister before stepping out of class to call back and ask what was going on.
Learning that Riley couldn’t be reached, Huth told the court, she began to panic because Riley “would run for a long time, but I knew she had class that day and I knew that she wasn’t one to be late or off schedule.”
Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard is presiding at the murder trial.
Ibarra waived his right to a jury trial, leaving his fate in the hands of Haggard.
