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IOWA CITY, IOWA — A jury reached a verdict Friday afternoon in the murder trial of a farm laborer charged with killing a University Iowa student in 2018. Jurors at the Scott County Courthouse in Davenport reached the verdict after about seven hours of deliberations on Thursday and Friday in the case of Cristhian Bahena Rivera. Court officials were expected to announce the verdict Friday afternoon. Bahena Rivera is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, who disappeared while out for a run in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, on July 18, 2018.

On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. His destination, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was not an especially notable target. His payload, however, a single bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” would change the course of history. True watershed moments in history are rare — the agricultural revolution is one such example, as was the Battle of Salamis, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the fall of Western Rome. Yet in the last 1,500 years, no two distinct epochs of time...

The mother of slain University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts opened up her home to the teenage son of Mexican immigrants who worked with the man suspected of killing her daughter and left the small town because they feared it was unsafe. Laura Calderwood took in Ulises Felix, 17, after his parents left Brooklyn, Iowa, according to the Washington Post. The man accused of killing 20-year-old Tibbetts, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, worked with Felix’s parents at a dairy farm in the small town. Felix said his mother cooked for Rivera and his cousin dated the suspect. Rivera and Felix’s cousin,...

The mother of Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old Iowa college student who was allegedly murdered earlier this year by an immigrant residing the U.S. illegally, adopted the child of Mexican immigrants who fled town after the man accused of killing her daughter was arrested. Laura Calderwood told The Washington Post in an interview published Friday that she had taken in Ulises Felix, 17, after his parents fled town following Cristhian Bahena Rivera's arrest... The Post reported that Felix's parents had worked alongside Rivera at the same dairy farm for years. Felix told the paper that his parents "took care of" Rivera...

Grieving father uses the death of his daughter to accuse Americans opposed to illegal immigration of racism. From Mollie Tibbetts' father: Don't distort her death to advance racist views.

Tibbetts’ dad Rob took to the paper’s pages Saturday to lambast those who cynically use the murder to score political points — using Trump Jr.’s own words against him. “I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., ‘heartless’ and ‘despicable,’” he wrote. It was the only time he mentioned Trump Jr. by name in the column, published in the same paper...

The paint on the road near a predominantly Latino community near Des Moines read, "Deport Illegals." The sprayed-on sentiment didn't last the day, but some officials in the Iowa city are worried it's indicative of a simmering resentment for immigrants that has become more public recently. The red paint defaced both directions on a two-lane road on the city's south side on Thursday. "These actions are unfortunate and not consistent with Des Moines' spirit of compassion," Mayor Frank Cownie said. "Such actions have no place in our city." A city worker painted over the words later in the day. The...

BROOKLYN, Iowa (AP) — The killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts has prompted criticism of the U.S. immigration system because the man charged in her death is a Mexican farmworker. But the victim's father told mourners he's been embraced by the local Hispanic community. Speaking Sunday afternoon to more than 1,000 people at a ceremony at his daughter's former high school, Rob Tibbetts didn't directly respond to comments by President Donald Trump and others who quickly seized upon the suspect's citizenship to argue for changes in immigration laws. However, The Des Moines Register reports that Tibbetts said he...

Open border advocates say that immigrants come here to do jobs Americans won’t do. Well, excuse me, but we have Americans all too willing to kill their brethren. Murder is a job American criminals are quite willing to do and to those who say immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than American citizens, I say that all that proves is that we have enough criminals -- we don’t need to import more.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/nation-world/mollie-tibbetts-case-exposes-farms-worst-kept-secret-hiring-undocumented-immigrants/507-587547900

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A top Republican fundraiser whose firm works for several prominent immigration hardliners is the partial owner of the land where the Mexican man accused of killing Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts lived rent-free, a farm spokeswoman said Friday. Nicole Schlinger has long been a key fundraiser and campaign contractor for GOP politicians in Iowa and beyond, including this cycle for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Virginia Senate candidate Corey Stewart. Schlinger is the president of Campaign Headquarters, a call center that makes fundraising calls, identifies supporters and helps turn out voters for conservative candidates and...

What the president’s supporters fear most isn’t the corruption of American law, but the corruption of America’s traditional identity. On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen’s admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump’s mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera. On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But...

(CNN)When Sen. John McCain's family announced Friday that he was ending medical treatment for aggressive brain cancer, the news shook Capitol Hill and prompted support from his Republican and Democratic colleagues alike. But one prominent voice was missing: President Donald Trump's. The White House press office did not react to the news, and when Trump traveled to Ohio in the evening he did not mention the ailing senator in a nearly hour-long speech to Ohio Republicans, which ran a gamut of topics from the death of Mollie Tibbetts to NFL protests to Kanye West.

EXCLUSIVE: 'Illegal' immigrant charged with killing Mollie Tibbetts tailed ANOTHER girl in his car and tried to flirt with her, in chilling echo of the Iowa student's murder Accused killer Cristhian Rivera pulled alongside another girl

Last month, I joined about 15,000 other cyclists in a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. We rode past cornfields and through small towns, which welcomed us with pork barbecue, slices of pie and all the trappings of a rolling state fair. Every so often, alongside the lemonade stands or in people’s yards, I spotted posters. They featured the smiling face of a young woman named Mollie Tibbetts. She was missing, the posters said. Please call with information. Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, went out for a run on July 18 in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, and never...

Donald Trump Jr. said Wednesday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t care about “actual Americans” after she dodged a question from CNN about slain Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts. ~snip~ The president’s eldest son slammed Ms. Warren for not sticking up for Americans. “Yea the real problem is not the murder of a young American girl,” he tweeted Wednesday. “You can’t make this crap up. Is the left’s platform really defend anyone but actual Americans? I don’t know how to interpret it any other way.”

Mollie Tibbetts died as a result of "sharp force injuries," the state medical examiner’s office revealed Thursday, confirming that the body found in a cornfield earlier this week was the missing college student. A preliminary autopsy was conducted on Wednesday. The medical examiner’s office said further examination of her body “may result in additional findings.”

Full headline: STATS: Mollie Tibbetts’ death by an illegal alien was tragic but the really bad news is she’s far from the only one Heartbreaking: News this week that 20-year-old University of Iowa sophomore Mollie Tibbetts had her life prematurely ended by an illegal alien who appears to have been taken with her romantically is tragic and sad on so many levels, not the least of which was the fact that much of the nation tuned in daily to see if authorities had made any progress in locating her after she went missing a month ago. That she was eventually...

I would like your thoughts on who first politicized Mollie Tibbetts’ murder. Many of us have been following Tibbetts’ disappearance and have been praying for her safe return. Her body was found on the same day that Manafort was convicted on 8 counts against him and Cohen grabbed headlines with his plea deal. I thought I first heard that woman on MSNBC had said something to the effect that ‘FoxNews isn’t reporting on the Manafort and Cohen legal battles, but instead is paying more attention to ‘some girl in Iowa’. Then Sen Warren said the murder of Mollie Tibbetts was...

On Tuesday, police finally found Mollie Tibbetts, the pretty Iowa college girl who had been missing since mid-July. She lay dead in a remote cornfield. The suspect in her murder led police to the body. He is 24 years old and in the country illegally. On August 12, police found Enedelia Perez Garcia, the mother of a little girl, stabbed to death in the murder suspect's apartment in Shakopee, Minnesota, a little southwest of Minneapolis. The suspect tried to kill himself. He is 27 and in the country illegally. Two more murder victims. Two more illegal aliens suspected.