Laken Riley murder suspect Jose Ibarra’s wife placed him at scene of crime in prison call: expert
ATHENS, Ga. – Georgia prosecutors on Monday placed Jose Ibarra, the suspect accused of murdering Augusta University nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus in February, at the scene using a jailhouse phone call to his wife, according to Fox News contributor Paul Mauro.
Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan national, is charged with 10 counts in connection with Riley’s murder on the morning of Feb. 22, when Riley was out for her usual morning jog along trails on the UGA campus near Lake Herrick. He will appear in an Athens courtroom for the third day of his murder trial on Tuesday.
On Monday, the second day of Ibarra’s trial, an Athens-Clarke County courtroom heard a recorded prison phone call between Ibarra and his wife, Layling Franco, that was played aloud and translated by an FBI analyst who spoke fluent Spanish.
“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 testified in court on Monday while translating the call for the prosecution.
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Mauro, a former executive officer for the New York Police Department‘s Intelligence Operations and Analysis Bureau, said the call essentially places Ibarra at the scene of the crime.
“She very clearly doesn’t believe him. … She says, at one point, ‘Jose, I know you,’ a very … telling moment,” Mauro said of the calling with Franco.. “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.'”
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Mauro said he believes the phone 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.”
“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,” Mauro said, referring to UGA Police Department bodycam footage played in court on Monday that showed investigators looking at Ibarra’s body for signs of injury.
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UGA PD patrol Cp. Rafael Sayan testified Monday that he questioned Ibarra on Feb. 23 — the day after Riley’s murder — about injuries on his hands and arms, which Ibarra mostly brushed off as general scratches or bleeding from the cold weather in February.
Bodycam footage from that morning show officers’ first encounter with Ibarra on Feb. 23. They initially arrived at the apartment around 8:30 a.m. on Feb. 23 and questioned Jose’s brothers, Diego and Argenis Ibarra, before they obtained a search warrant and went inside the apartment.
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The footage shows officers walking inside shining a light on Jose, who was in bed at the time, and repeatedly saying “hola” in an effort to wake him up. After about a minute, Jose gets out of bed and puts his hands up.
“This is speculation, but I suspect he was likely highly intox[icated],” Mauro said, noting that investigators linked a white plastic cup containing a liquid smelling of alcohol to the scene of Riley’s murder. A suspicious male was seen holding a white cup in security camera footage taken near the crime scene that morning. Late on, investigators found a similar white, plastic cup that smelled of alcohol on Feb. 22, according to law enforcement testimony on Monday.
The suspect is charged with 10 counts total, including one count of malice murder, three counts of felony murder, one count of kidnapping, one count of aggravated assault with intent to rape, one count of aggravated battery, one count of hindering a 911 call, one count of tampering with evidence and one count of being a “peeping Tom.” Ibarra pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Prosecutor Ross said Ibarra then encountered Riley on her typical morning run and attacked her.
“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 campus,” Ross said in her opening statement Friday.
Ibarra and his brothers, also in the United States illegally from Venezuela, lived in an apartment building less than a half mile from the on-campus park where Riley was running.
The defendant’s attorney, Dustin Kirby, argued in his opening statement that evidence would not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ibarra killed Riley. He said it would take “gymnastics” for the prosecution to argue Ibarra killed Riley with what he described as “circumstantial evidence.”
“If that happens and the presumption of innocence is respected, there should not be enough evidence to convince you beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Ibarra is guilty of the crimes charged,” Kirby said on Monday.
UGA Police Chief Jeffrey Clark previously described the murder as a “crime of opportunity” during a February press conference.
Ibarra illegally crossed into the United States through El Paso, Texas, in September 2022 and was released into the U.S. via parole, ICE and DHS sources previously told Fox News.
Diego Ibarra, who worked briefly in a UGA cafeteria before his arrest in February, is charged with green card fraud and had ties to a known Venezuelan gang in the U.S., called Tren de Aragua, according to federal court documents.
On Friday afternoon, the defense subpoenaed Diego Ibarra and their younger brother, Argenis Ibarra, to testify during Jose’s trial on Wednesday.
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ICE previously confirmed to Fox News Digital that Jose Ibarra had been arrested by the New York Police Department a year after he entered the U.S. in August 2023 and was “charged with acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and a motor vehicle license violation.”
Mauro said some criminal cases become “representative of something larger than themselves,” and Riley’s case is one of them.
“This forced…these issues forward. All the sudden, you had to talk about this stuff,” Mauro said, referencing the topic of illegal immigration.
The former NYPD officer also praised the UGA Police Department’s quick work to apprehend the suspect in connection with Riley’s murder just a day after she was killed.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw contributed to this report.