The illegal immigrant accused of murdering University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley sat in court for the first day of his trial Friday and heard the 911 call her friends made reporting her missing.
Jose Ibarra, 26, is charged with killing the 22-year-old in February after she went for a run around the campus in Athens, Georgia, where Ibarra was a resident.
The Venezuelan national was arrested the day after Riley’s body was found and his immigration status thrust the case into the national spotlight, with immigration a key issue during the 2024 presidential election.
Prosecutors say Ibarra struck Riley in the head, asphyxiated her, and intended to sexually assault her, but his attorney argues the evidence does not stack up, particularly relating to that last accusation.
As Ibarra’s trial got underway Friday, the court heard from Riley’s roommates, who called 911 the day she died.
“We were roommates but the term roommates is an over-generalization of our relationship,” Lilly Steiner told the court. “Our house was like a little family and we called each other family.
“We did everything together, we had family dinners, family TV nights and movie nights. Laken brought a sense of joy to our lives that has been missing ever since.”
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What happened to Laken Riley?
Riley was a nursing student at Augusta University’s campus in Athens, Georgia. She had been a student at UGA until May 2023.
On the morning of February 22, 2024, the student went for a run around a lake on the campus but did not come home.
Police responded to a missing persons call at around noon that day. Riley’s body was found around an hour later.
Prosecutors say she had been struck in the head multiple times with a rock. She had also been strangled. Officers said at the time that her cause of death was blunt force trauma.
University Police Chief Jeff Clark said that Riley’s murder was a “crime of opportunity”.
Who killed Laken Riley?
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, Pool, File
Prosecutors believe Jose Ibarra is Riley’s killer. Officers arrested him after tracking his movements through surveillance camera footage.
Ibarra was charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another. In total, he faces 10 charges, which he denies.
The 26-year-old was living less than a mile from the campus at the time, but his history in the U.S. soon became a focal point of Riley’s case.
Ibarra arrived in the U.S. in September 2022, having crossed the southwest border illegally in El Paso, Texas. Immigration officials detained him but later released him, while his case was pending.
The suspect was later arrested in New York in August 2023. It is not clear at which point between that date and February 2024 he arrived in Georgia.
Ibarra’s immigration status drew attention from the then-favorite Republican Party presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who blamed Riley’s death on the Biden administration and its border policies.
The case became one of a handful of deaths linked to illegal immigrants picked up by the GOP, who argued criminals were pouring into the country across the “open” southwest border.
While some, including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, called for the death penalty, prosecutors are now pursuing a life sentence without parole.
Ibarra waived his right to a jury trial earlier this week.
What we know about the Laken Riley 911 call
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During the hearing in Athens Friday, Riley’s former roommate Lilly Steiner gave her testimony, describing their campus home as more than just a group of roommates, but a family unit.
Steiner, 22, was the one who dialed 911, along with her friends, when they became worried about Riley on February 22, and prosecutors played the recording in the courtroom.
“We’re calling because our roommate went out for a run at 9, she usually runs… behind the grad housing and we haven’t heard from her,” Steiner told the dispatcher. “We went to go look where her last location was and all we found was an AirPod.”
The friends said they had been trying to call Riley, but she wasn’t picking up. The dispatcher told them to go to the last known location to meet officers, who were on their way, at around 12 p.m.
“She has class at 1. She goes to nursing school and she does not miss class,” Sofia Magana, also on the call, said, explaining that Riley’s location had not changed for around 3.5 hours.
Magana was later shown the single AirPod she had found looking for Riley and later handed to police officers.
Later, the court heard a 911 call made just after 9 a.m. that morning which did not include any discernable speech.
“Can anyone hear me?” the dispatcher was heard asking, as birds were heard chirping in the background at the other end of the line.
