Laken Riley’s roommates recall in court what happened before police found her body on UGA’s campus

On Friday, testimony from the roommates of the 22-year-old nursing student who was killed on the University of Georgia campus kicked off the man’s trial. Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University, was killed on February 22 while running close to the campus’s intramural fields. Her roommates’ behavior when she failed to come home helped investigators in the early stages of the case.

Lilly Steiner, Sofia Magana, and Connolly Huth were among Riley’s roommates, according to testimony given in court on Friday. The 22-year-old Steiner explained her bond with Riley, describing it as essentially familial. “Laken brought a sense of joy to all of our lives that has been missing ever sense,” she claimed. One day prior to the jury selection for Jose Ibarra’s trial, a hearing got underway at 10 a.m.

When Steiner stated she wanted to grab coffee with Riley on the morning of February 22, she couldn’t find her in the house and used the Find My Friends app to find out where she was. It indicated that Riley was on one of her usual running routes. While Steiner was testifying, a map from the app was shown in court. She stated, “It was about 9:30 from what I remember,” when she first looked at the app. “When I got home from my first set of errands and I saw that Laken still wasn’t home, that wasn’t unusual because it was about an hour after I checked her first location, so I thought maybe she was just still on a run,” she stated.

She claimed that when she checked again at around 10:45 a.m., the app indicated she was in the same place, which caused her to become concerned. “I texted Laken just checking in on her and then addressing Connolly in a group message, I said, ‘She’s been in the woods a while.'” Since AT&T was having problems on this particular day, Steiner claimed that if she wasn’t using her home WiFi, she wouldn’t be able to use her phone.

She claimed to have left her house once again at 10:45 a.m. and arrived back at 11:30 a.m. “I immediately pulled in and I saw Sofia standing outside with her dog and I got out of the car and she immediately said, ‘Can we go look for Laken?'” Steiner gave a statement. Using the Find My Friends app as a guide, they set out from home to find their roommate. They went to the address on their phone, but she wasn’t there.

“When we were walking, Sofia noticed an… AirPod that was sitting on the trail right around where her location was,” Steiner said. “She picked it up, kind of assuming it was Laken’s.” Steiner testified that she called the UGA Police Department once they got home. Magana also testified, recounting the events of their early hunt for Riley. She claimed that they photographed and gathered the AirPod when they discovered it. The AT&T outage also prevented her from having phone service while she was away from home.

“I told her (Lilly) we were going to walk back to call the police because we both didn’t have service,” she recalled. Magana claimed that after making the call, she proceeded to get Huth and that they met up with Steiner and the police in the vicinity. At the fields, they spoke with a police officer who directed them to the location of Laken’s pinging phone. He requested that they take a screenshot and send it to him via email. Then, using their screenshot, body camera footage showed him walking into the woods. He discovered Riley’s body in this manner.

The majority of Huth’s testimony regarding Riley’s running habits came from the third roommate. “She always had a watch on,” she stated. “She would listen to music while running; sometimes, when she was alone, she would call her mom.” More testimony was given in court on Friday, and it reconvened on Monday morning. Jose Ibarra is charged with a number of crimes, including murder.