Farmworker found guilty of murdering Iowa student is sentenced to life in prison

[August 31, 2021]  By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) - A Mexican farmworker found guilty in May of murdering an Iowa college student three years ago, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison without parole.

The case was seized on in 2018 as a talking point by former President Donald Trump as he railed against illegal immigration.

In May, a jury in Davenport, Iowa, found Cristhian Bahena Rivera guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student.

Tibbetts disappeared while out for a run on the evening of July 18, 2018, in Brooklyn, Iowa.

Bahena Rivera, who had entered the United States illegally, was arrested about a month later after police said they identified him using a security video from a camera outside a Brooklyn house near where Tibbetts was last seen running.

After an 11-hour interrogation, police said Bahena Rivera led them to Tibbetts' body in a cornfield. She had been stabbed several times, prosecutors said.

Shortly after Bahena Rivera's arrest, Trump brought up the case after making a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border a signature goal of his administration.

"Mollie was a young woman who simply wanted to go for a quiet run on the evening of July 18 and you chose to violently and sadistically end that life," Laura Calderwood, Tibbetts' mother, wrote in a victim impact statement, which was read during the sentencing on Monday.

"Mr. Bahena Rivera, you and you alone forever changed the lives of those who loved Mollie Tibbetts," Judge Joel Yates said on Monday.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

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