BROOKLYN, IA — Laura Calderwood, the mother of Mollie Tibbets, the University of Iowa student who disappearance and killing last summer attracted national attention, is determined that her daughter shouldn’t become a political football. Calderwood has done something many might consider remarkable in light of the fact that an undocumented immigrant farmworker has been charged with first-degree murder in her daughter’s death: She has taken into her home a 17-year-old boy whose Mexican immigrant parents worked alongside the man accused of killing Mollie.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old undocumented immigrant who worked at a Brooklyn, Iowa, dairy farm, had no sooner been arrested in mid-August when the anti-immigrant rhetoric boiled over. President Trump made Tibbetts’ killing a centerpiece of a campaign-style rally in West Virginia.
“You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in, very sadly, from Mexico and you saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful young woman?” Trump said at a rally in West Virginia the day Rivera was arrested. “Should have never happened. Illegally in our country.” Iowa’s governor chimed in, calling Rivera “a predator” and blaming Tibbetts’ killing on a “broken immigration system.” The governor of Texas tweeted Tibbetts’ death is “why so many Americans are angry about sanctuary cities” and why his state banned them.
Tibbetts’ body was found rotting in an Iowa cornfield on Aug. 21, the same day Rivera was arrested. She had not been seen since July 18, when she took a jog around her hometown of Brooklyn.
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Calderwood, 55, a lifelong liberal, refused to abandon her principles, according to a report by Terrence McCoy in The Washington Post. He wrote:
“She feels anger like the others, but not toward an entire group of people. She’s not afraid of the demographic change remaking the country. But she does fear the deepening polarization. So she never goes to political rallies — never speaks publicly — because she believes that would just inflame things. Instead, she tries to live every day … just as she did before it all happened.”
As the furor over Tibbetts’ death increased — including robo-calls from a white supremacist group using a Brooklyn phone number that said “we don’t have to kill them all, but we do have to deport them all” — the immigrant parents of Ulises Felix thought Iowa was too dangerous for them and packed up and moved to Illinois.
They gave their son the opportunity to stay in Brooklyn and finish high school. He was friends with Tibbetts’ brother, Scott, but the family ties don’t end there. As The Post reported, Felix’s cousin has a child by Rivera.
When he came home from school to find an empty house, Scott asked his mother if his friend could stay in their home. She rolled the question around in her mind, then finally asked herself what Mollie would want. The answer was clear, and she offered the teenager a spare bedroom.
Together, they have navigated their feelings of loss, and Calderwood has learned Rivera is not quite the boogeyman the politicians have made him out to be.
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» Read the full story on The Washington Post.
Image of Mollie Tibbetts via Poweshiek County Sheriff’s Department