Transcript of The Murder of Laken Riley

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On February 22nd, Jose Abara 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. In his hunt, he encountered 22-year-old Laken Reilly on her morning jog. When Laken Reilly refused to be his rape victim, he bashed her skull in with a rock repeatedly. That is what this case is all about.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily. On Wednesday afternoon, inside a courtroom in Athens, Georgia, a guilty verdict was reached in what prosecutors have described as a cut and dried case of cold-blooded murder. But outside that courtroom, the case has become something far bigger. Today. National reporter, Rick Rojas, on how the death of Laken Reilly has become a flashpoint in the national debate over border security, illegal immigration, and mass deportation. It's Thursday, November 21st. Rick, tell us about the woman at the center of this entire story, Laken Reilly.

Lake and Reilly is a 22-year-old nursing student living in Athens, which is a bustling college town here in Georgia. It's about an hour, hour and a half away from Atlanta, and she's just leading a very normal college life. She lives in a house close to the University of Georgia campus with a group of roommates. They talk about each other like their family. They have meals together, they have movie nights, they share each others' locations from their phones so they can keep an eye on each other. And Laken is an avid runner. She regularly suits up and takes a long jog, and that's exactly what she did on the morning of February 22nd. At about 9:00 AM, she heads out for a run. And then she heads into the woods running on what is usually a very placid, peaceful, widely considered safe place. The first sign of trouble comes about 10 minutes later. She activates the emergency function on her iPhone, and it calls 911. Farc County, number one.

Hello, this is Farc County, number one.

A dispatcher picks up the phone and keeps asking if anyone's there, but the line is silent. Can anyone hear me? For almost a minute, there's no response. And then you hear a faint voice saying, Yo tengo, or I have, in Spanish. And then the call ends. After about an hour from 9:00 to 10:00 AM and then to 11:00 AM, Laken's roommate start to get worried about her. Where is she? What happened? And so that's when they use the location sharing function on the phone to try to track her down. It did not give a precise location, but it gave them a rough sense of where she was. In the course of looking for her, one of her roommates actually finds one of her earpods on the ground. That's a very chilling sign that something's going on with Laken. That's when they call in the police. A campus police officer from the University of Georgia sets out looking for her, and they find her shortly after noon that day. Her body has been dragged about 60 feet from the trail. She's been covered with leaves. Her top has been lifted over her head. She's bloodied, clearly beaten.

It's clear from that moment that there's been a vicious attack that ended in Laken Reilly's death. So not long after Laken's body is discovered, investigators start finding all kinds of evidence. They find a bloody jacket that's been thrown away in a dumpster. They find security camera footage showing someone throwing that jacket away. They find her phone with a thumbprint on it. They find DNA evidence under her fingernails that they believe shows who her attacker was. And they quickly find an arrest for a suspected killer. And as far as the authorities are concerned, it's a pretty open and shut case. It's very straightforward who they believe did this, and then they have the evidence to back that up. As awful as this case is, as gruesome as the details are, it's also not the case that would necessarily rise to a national news story until we find out who the police have arrested.

What do you mean?

We quickly learned that the suspect had come into the United States illegally, and suddenly this is no longer simply a local murder case. It becomes something much bigger, and it becomes a political symbol.

Which we're going to get to But, Rick, first tell us about this suspect and how he ended up in these woods near the University of Georgia.

Jose Antonio Ibarra is a 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela who had this circuitous path that led him to Athens, Georgia. He entered the United States illegally on the border near El Paso, Texas, in September of 2022. He's arrested by immigration authorities, and then he is released while his case is being reviewed. It's happening in a time when the border and the Biden administration, in particular, has just been overwhelmed by a surge in border crossings, and particularly with migrants coming from Venezuela, migrants like Mr. Ibarra.

What happens to him once he's released into the United States?

He heads to New York City. First, he goes to Queens. He stays at a Crown Plaza hotel there that had been converted into a migrant shelter. While he was in New York, in August of 2022, he was arrested for driving a scooter without a license with a child who was not wearing a helmet. He was not prosecuted or jailed in that case. A few weeks later, he goes to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, which had become the city's official welcome center for migrants. He goes through a process that's known as reticketing, where the city pays for migrants to move elsewhere. So he gets a ticket to leave for Atlanta on September 28th. That's how he ends up in Athens, in Georgia, where his brother already is and has found work.

So he briefly becomes part of this wave of migrants that those of us who live in New York City remember really well. There are so many coming so quickly that the city sets up a bunch of hotels and shelters to deal with them and ultimately allows some, perhaps even encourages some, it sounds like including Ybarra, to leave New York City and go someplace else to relieve the pressure on city resources.

Right. And so at that point, He moves to Athens and lives in an apartment complex that's just a short walking distance from the University of Georgia campus that's home to working class immigrants who have ended up here in this Georgia city from all over the place, including Asia and Latin America. Then in October, just a few more weeks after he arrives in Georgia, he and his brother are both arrested in connection with a shoplifting case at a local Walmart. But he's not detained The authorities run his name through state and national databases at the time but don't find any warrants for him, and so he's released.

I just want to be sure I understand. At this point, he's been arrested three times First time when he enters the country unlawfully, but then he is released. A second time in New York City for the scooter incident, now a third time for shoplifting. At no point, it sounds like is there any effort to detain him for some meaningful period or perhaps deport him.

Because of all of this, his immigration status, his previous arrests, his repeated releases, when he's arrested for murdering Lincoln Reilly, the case just blows up. I said earlier it became a political symbol. And remember the timing? It's February in a presidential election year. This is Georgia, a swing state, and illegal immigration is a huge priority for voters. So Republicans, all the way up to Donald Trump, decide that this is the case to focus on. This, for them, is the case that encapsulates all the dangers of illegal migration, and they're going to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it as much as humanly possible.

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Listen now on your favorite podcast platform. This podcast is supported by ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents, and they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times, and they will do it again to protect immigrants rights, defend reproductive freedom, safeguard free speech, and fight for all of our fundamental civil rights. Join the ACLU today to help stop the Extreme Project 2025 agenda. Learn more at aclu. Org. So, Rick, what exactly do Republicans do with this case back in February once Jose Ibarra is arrested and his immigration status becomes widely understood?

They waste no time speaking out about it. Our hearts are breaking this morning for the family of Lake and Reilly. Just two days after Lake and Reilly is killed, Brian Kemp, Georgia's Republican governor, sends a letter to President Biden demanding answers about Jose Ibarra's immigration status. Laken's death is a direct result of failed policies on the federal level and an unwillingness by this White House to secure the Southern border. And he even delivers a speech about it where he just rips into Biden. And because of the White House's failures, every state is now a border state. And Lake and Reilly's murder is just the latest proof of that. And then, two weeks later, Georgia Republicans bring the issue to President Biden even more directly at his State of the Union address. Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States. As President Biden enters the House of Representatives, he is confronted by Marjorie Taylor-Green, a Republican representative from Georgia. She's wearing a T-shirt that says, Say Her Name. She's wearing a pin with Lake and Reilly's face on It. Then during the speech- My team began serious negotiation of the- As President Biden starts to talk about legislative efforts to address immigration issues, Representative Green speaks up.

Not really.

She begins heckling President Biden during his address, goading him to say her name and to directly address this case. And so he does, or at least he attempts to. Lincoln Lincoln-Reilly, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. In the process of trying to say her name, he mispronounced it, which has given more fadder to Conservatives. But at the same time, he says that this is an innocent young woman who has been killed by an illegal, a term that is deeply offensive to many people on the left and immigration advocates for immigrants who see this term as just dehumanizing and pejorative. In a way, he ends up just- Pleasing no one. Right. He just wades right into this mess and just makes it even worse in some ways. He just offends everyone across the board.

By this point, the death of Laken Reilly has gone national into the most watched presidential speech of the year. Where does it go from there?

It goes right to the center of President Trump's campaign this year. From 2016 on, Trump has focused a lot of his attention on illegal migration, and he's tried to portray undocumented immigrants as violent and used a lot of incendiary language, even playing on racial stereotypes and anxieties, to try to describe the minutes that he says they have been to the country. Now suddenly, as his campaign is heating up again, and he returns to this theme of illegal immigration, he has a villain that he can point to as representing representative of everything that he has been arguing for years. And so Trump and his allies just bring this case up exhaustively.

Laken was a brilliant young student.

They bring it up at rallies.

He was assaulted, beaten, and horrifically murdered by an illegal alien.

They bring it up in advertisements and in conservative media. Lake and Reilly should have been able to go on a run in broad daylight without being murdered by an illegal no immigrant. All in an effort to paint this case as something widespread or common. How many more killers has Biden set free? In the interview, it is representative of this bigger failure on the part of the Biden administration to crack down on illegal immigration and to crack down on the Southern border. They frame this case as just the tip of an iceberg.

Right. It It felt like the Biden campaign was struggling when Biden was the nominee to respond to this because this incident had occurred on his watch and there had been a meaningful rise in illegal immigration when he was President. But I want to just pause, Rick, and ask, based on your reporting, how representative what Jose Ibarra is accused of doing here really is of undocumented immigrants. According to Trump and Republicans, this is common. This is a real threat. What's the actual reality of it?

I mean, this is very clearly an aberration. What Jose Ibarra is accused of doing is in no way reflective of the intentions or the actions of the vast majority of the people who are undocumented and who enter the United States. The studies have repeatedly shown the opposite, that this is a population that is doing everything they can to avoid detection, to keep their head down. Their intention is not to come here in so unrest and to perpetrate violence. It's really to get away from something else and seek economic opportunity. While this case is very much real, it's not necessarily an indictment of undocumented people more broadly. But President and Trump and other Conservatives have highlighted this case because it so neatly makes the point that they want to make, even if the evidence more broadly, doesn't bear this out.

Right. Of course, for many Americans, one murder by somebody who is in the United States unlawfully is going to be one murder too many. But even if the end of Jose Ibarra's journey in the United States is rare, a violent act, a murder, it feels like the rest of his journey feels much more common for somebody who comes here illegally. He enters the country, he's given taxpayer-funded resources in multiple locations, and he is not deported, even when he does have encounters with law enforcement. That part of the story on its own for a lot of people, is very problematic.

Yes. One murder is too for sure. But I think, as you said, Abbar's entire journey touches on many people's frustrations, where the system is falling short and how migrants in these situations are treated. I think there's this underlying sense of fairness that I think drives a lot of the opposition. Before the election, when I talked to voters, I heard about that, about the resources, about the taxpayer dollars that have gone to supporting these migrants, that they're getting access to support and a pathway to a secure place in this country that doesn't exist for other people. They look at Jose Bar and say, why did this person get a hotel room in New York City paid for by the government? Why was he flown to Georgia on the taxpayers's time? And whether you think this is a good use of money or not, those are the questions that are being asked. Why is someone who is here unlawfully getting something that US citizens aren't? How does that make sense? And then on top of all these of fairness, now you have this murder.

Right. After this presidential campaign from Donald Trump, in which he makes immigration, and at times this case, which he has invoked, such a big part of his message, Trump wins the election. He wins Georgia, where this crime happened among other swing states. Millions of voters, tens of millions of voters, effectively effectively endorse his call for mass deportation on a scale we have never seen before in the United States. He's calling for millions of people to be deported. In his telling, somebody like Jose Abara is exactly who should be deported when that mass deportation starts. Then, as fate would have it, right after this election, in fact, I think just two weeks after this election, this murder trial of Jose Abara begins in Athens, Georgia.

Right. The trial moves fast. The defense was concerned about being able to find a jury in Athens, a city that was just rattled by this killing, who could dispassionately hear the evidence and render a verdict. So they asked for a bench trial instead, meaning it's the judge who decided whether or not he was guilty. So after four days of testimony, the judge reaches his verdict, and He delivers it just 15 minutes after the lawyers had finished their closing arguments.

He did not hesitate. No.

He found him guilty. Then later in the afternoon, he sentenced Sabara to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Now that Jose Abara has been convicted and sentenced, how do we think that this case will live on in a post-election world in which the president-elect and soon to be inaugurated, President Trump, is talking so much about illegal immigration and mass deportation. I think he, just a day or so ago, mentioned a plan to invoke a national emergency and use the military to carry out mass deportation. What happens to this case, given how it has now been resolved in that context?

So this guilty verdict is already being embraced as validation by the people who have raised the profile of this case from the very beginning. The people who have wanted to focus on this case as a justification for cracking down on illegal immigration, not Not long after the verdict on Wednesday, Trump came out and celebrated it and linked it to his plan for deportation. He said, It's time to secure our border and remove these criminals and thugs from our country, so nothing like this can to happen again. And so clearly, this case is going to be a part of how this new administration makes the case for mass deportation. The outcome of this election and the outcome of this trial, all but ensure that this case is going to live on in some way for a very long time.

Well, Rick, thank you very much.

Thank you.

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