“It’s a great day to be alive.”
That was twenty year old Mollie Tibbetts’ last and eerily haunting instagram bio. The short message was easily a clear reflection of the sort of person Mollie was; kind, adventurous and hopeful. She was a young woman with the rest of her life to look forward to. She was a new psychology major at the University of Iowa, because she valued the ability to help others. She was about to be a maid-of-honour at one of her closest friends’ wedding. Her life was so achingly, so frustratingly full of potential . . . and in July of this year, it was cut brutally short.
Mollie had been dog-sitting for her boyfriend, Dalton Jack, at his residence early last month when she vanished. The warning signs became painfully obvious to her parents and loved ones when she not only missed her work shift on the morning of July 19th, but also, more worryingly, when she could not be reached by anyone.
Within that week law enforcement launched a full scale investigation into the dissapearance of the twenty year old. Neighbors were interviewed, security cameras from the surrounding areas were confiscated, and most devastatingly for her family, investigators and volunteers began to embark upon expansive searches throughout the fields and lakes that covered their little town. For more than thirty days, the desperate search for Mollie dragged on. Her closest family members clung to the hope that she was alive somewhere. The rural town they called home was awash with people who knew the young woman and overcome by the story of her dissappearance. People volunteered their time, their money and their voices, all in the hope that they could bring her home alive and well. This belief that something could be done to get Mollie back to her family was so strong, that a donation fund for reward money managed to raise a staggering $400,000 for her cause.
Unfortunately, while the Brooklyn townspeople were busy trying to find their missing girl, a police investigation was well underway. And the closer investigators got to finding a suspect, the more the situation seemed as though they would eventually find a body. And on the morning of August 22nd, those fears were confirmed when police were led to the body of Mollie Tibbetts, which had been hidden in a corn field, by her attacker and killer. He is an undocumented immigrant, Cristhian Bathena Rivera. According to reports, Rivera had been “drawn”, for some perverse reason, to Mollie. He had apparently followed her in his car whilst she was out for a run sometime last month, harrassing her as she tried to evade him. Then he went as far as to get out of his vehicle and run alongside her on the path. When Mollie told him she was ready to call the police, he attacked. According to him, he cannot remember the exact details of the events that followed and may have even “blacked out.”What we know for certain is that Mollie didn’t survive her encounter with Rivera.
Despite this already being a horrifying case of loss and murder,this is not the end of Mollie’s story, nor is it the end of the stress her family has had to endure in the public eye. You see, what makes the case of Mollie Tibbetts death so unique and something that we so desperately need to talk about is the political firestorm that followed her death. This isn’t just the story of a beautiful, brilliant girl’s life that was taken, this is the story of how America has chosen to handle her death, and the obvious pain that her family is in.
Mere hours after the immigration status and ethnicity of Mollie’s killer had been released, the White House was up and ready, making statements about immigration reform, after nearly thirty days of radio silence regarding the actual victim, Mollie. Both the President and the Vice President made personal and public statements about the need for tighter immigration policy in the wake of Mollie’s death, despite the fact that neither of them had done anything to raise awareness for the missing girl in the previous month. It seemed, to many, that they cared more about the chance to turn the situation to politics, than they actually cared about the fact that a young woman had been brutally murdered.
They used this girl and her death as a tool to drive a wedge straight into America’s political discourse. They offered generic sentiments of sympathy to her family, while using Mollie’s death to make a political point. No one in the administration seemed to care, however, when a greiving Rob Tibbetts (Mollie’s father) made a statement during his daughter’s eulogy. His statement was in support of the hispanic community because of the horrific hatred coming from people as a result of the President’s statements. Comments like: ‘I’m sorry you were killed by an illegal’ & ‘this is why we need to build a wall’ are scattered about her and her family’s social media pages. All of this, taking the attention away from the life and the loss of a beautiful young woman.
The truly frustrating part about this hijacking of Mollie’s story is that had someone in the White House cared about Mollie before they had the chance to use her death for politics, there might’ve been a different outcome. The single most powerful thing for a missing person’s case is exposure. Getting that person’s face and name out into the media increases the chance that they might be found sooner. Imagine if Mr.Trump could’ve found it in his heart to tweet about Mollie a month ago? Who knows how national exposure like that might have changed the fate of her case. How many more volunteers would have gone out to look for her? How much sooner might they have found her body? How much suffering her family could have been spared?
The point of the matter is this, and will remain this, we cannot posthumously use the personal tragedies of victims of violence to tell a stories that we want to tell. We cannot hijack the narratives of the dead. Mollie Deserved better.