The lawyer for the Mexican national convicted in the 2018 murder of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts admitted that the migrant crisis is allowing people into the United States with “bad intentions” — and claimed there “absolutely” could be a connection between his client and Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s alleged murderer.
“Illegal immigration does come with an element of – well, problems,” Chad Frese told The Post this week, in the wake of Riley’s eerily similar murder.
Frese represented Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who kidnapped and murdered Tibbetts, a 20-year-old psychology major while she was on a run in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, about 70 miles east of Des Moines.
Over a month after Tibbetts went missing, Rivera led authorities to her corpse in a cornfield, where her body was found with up to 12 stab wounds, the state medical examiner said.
A jury found Rivera guilty of first-degree murder, and sentenced him to life in prison in August 2021.
“With any immigration, legal or illegal, you’re going to have some people who come here with bad intentions,” Frese said.
The Iowa-based attorney called the “bizarre parallels” between Tibbetts’ murder and that of Riley – an Augusta University student who was killed on the University of Georgia campus while out on a run on Feb. 22 – “staggering.
And he said it “wouldn’t surprise” him if their murderers were somehow connected.
“We’ll have locals who immigrate to the central Iowa area, who have come from the Georgia area, or move to the Georgia area. So it’s not atypical to have a Mexican national living in the central Iowa area working at a packing plant, who previously lived in East Point, Georgia, for instance.
“Could there be some connection there? Absolutely, because they move and they go where they’re familiar and they’re comfortable,” Frese said.
Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal Venezuelan immigrant, has been charged in the 22-year-old’s grisly murder, which Georgia cops called a “crime of opportunity.”
Ibarra, 26, was cut loose after he was arrested in the Big Apple on Aug. 31 and charged with child endangerment.
In October, cops in Athens, Georgia cited him for shoplifting, then issued a warrant for his arrest when he blew off his December court appearance.
“I’ve always thought there’s something larger at play than just my client randomly picking out Mollie Tibbetts and randomly killing her,” Frese recalled. “I don’t think it’s as simple as a Mexican national going up beside a beautiful young woman and passively stabbing her.”
Tammy Nobles, whose daughter Kayla Hamilton allegedly was fatally strangled by an illegal El Salvadoran immigrant in her Maryland apartment last year, also sees the similarities in the young women’s murders.
“Mollie and Laken were just running, just doing their normal thing, and Kayla was sleeping in her bed in her own home. The girls were not doing anything wrong…They did not put themselves in harm’s way,” she said.
Nobles seethed that government officials were asleep at the wheel in taking steps to keep Americans safe, and demanded that the Biden administration properly scrutinize who is coming into the country.
“We need to stop letting [illegal immigrants] in, [or] we need to properly vet and background check them,” she said. “It’s not okay for our American citizens to be murdered by people that shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
