National Post (National Edition)
DEATH BECOMES TALKING POINT
ACCUSED IS AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT
For the past four years, Cristhian Rivera has spent his days caring for herds of meat and dairy cattle just outside Brooklyn, Iowa. On the evening of July 18, he told investigators, he spotted a young woman in workout clothes, jogging alone.
Rivera, 24, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who worked at Yarrabee Farms, drove past the woman several times, his Chevrolet Malibu going in and out of the frame of a surveillance camera aimed at the street.
“It seemed that he followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day,” Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Agent Rick Rahn told reporters Tuesday. “And for whatever reason, he chose to abduct her.”
At first, Rivera told authorities, he pursued the woman in his car. Then he got out and ran beside her. The woman was frightened, Rivera recalled. She pulled out her phone and told him, “I’m gonna call police.”
What happened next, Rivera claims, is blocked from his memory, something he said happens when he gets upset or angry. The next thing he recalled, he told investigators, was being in his car and finding a headphone earpiece in his lap that did not belong to him. That prompted him to open his trunk, where he saw the woman in workout clothes, bleeding from the head and motionless.
The woman was Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old psychology student at the University of Iowa whose disappearance sparked a month-long search by federal, state and local authorities, and whose killing has now become a talking point for conserva- tives arguing for more restrictive immigration laws.
On Tuesday, investigators revealed what had happened to her, as told by the man they say killed her, then hid her body. Rivera said he dragged, then carried Tibbetts’s body 60 feet into an isolated cornfield near Brooklyn. Then he dropped her on the ground, face up, covered her with corn stalks and walked away.
After the interview, he led investigators to Tibbetts’s body. On Tuesday, Rivera was charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’s killing. He is in jail, with bail set at $1 million.
Rivera was in the country illegally, but appears to have used a stolen identification card to satisfy a federal immigration background check by his employer through the Department of Homeland Security’s E-verify system, a law enforcement official told The Washington Post.
Yarrabee Farms president Eric Lang told the Associated Press that Rivera had been in good standing as an employee.
Lang is the brother of Craig Lang, a prominent Iowa farmer who recently lost the 2018 Republican primary to become Iowa’s agriculture secretary.
A search of Iowa court records revealed Rivera has no prior criminal history, and it’s unclear whether he had ever been subject to deportation proceedings.
His Facebook page described him as being from Guayabillo, a community of fewer than 500 people in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
Within hours of the news conference announcing Rivera’s arrest, President Donald Trump had weighed in on the killing, telling a West Virginia audience about an “illegal alien” that had just been arrested:
“You saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful woman (Mollie Tibbetts),” he said. “Should have never happened ... the immigration laws are such a disgrace. We’re getting them changed.”
Conservatives used the killing to bolster their arguments for harsher immigration policies.
“Mollie Tibbetts’s killer is here illegally,” said Corey Stewart, who’s running for U.S. Senate in Virginia. “This is why I have been tough on this issue for 10 years. There are thousands of victims like Mollie because weak politicians are afraid to enforce the law.”
The results of an autopsy are pending, and Rahn did not specify a cause of death.
A representative for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that the agency lodged an immigration detainer on Rivera with local authorities after his arrest Tuesday.
That means that if Rivera is ever released, he would be sent back to Mexico.