Up next
Tuesday's Final Word
A judge in the Dominican Republic told police to stop surveilling the man who last saw a University of Pittsburgh student alive but declined to order them to return his passport so he can leave the country.
Sudiksha Konanki, 20, was last seen early in the morning on March 6 on the beach by her hotel in Punta Cana, where she and five other students had gone for spring break, as CrimeOnline reported. The group had been out dancing and drinking before heading to the beach, and the other five women went back to the hotel just before 6 a.m. while Konanki stayed on the beach with Joshua Riibe, a 22-year-old St. Cloud State University student in Minnesota.
Police confiscated Riibe’s passport and have extensively questioned him, prompting his attorney to seek a habeas corpus hearing to get him out from under police authority. The judge said a ruling on the habeas corpus could be expected by March 28, ABC News reported.
“I can’t go anywhere. And I really want to be able to go home, talk to my family, give them hugs, tell them I miss them,” Riibe said at Tuesday’s hearing. “I understand I’m here to help, but it’s been 10 days and I can’t leave.”
Prosecutors, at times contentiously, insisted that Riibe was not actually under surveillance during the hearing, noting that he was not escorted into the courtroom. But Riibe and his father, Albert Riibe, testified that officers follow them to restaurants and everywhere else they want to go.
Riibe told the court that Konanki’s mother hugged him and thanked him before she left the Dominican Republic.
“Her mother gave me a hug and said, ‘Thank you for saving my daughter the first time,”‘ Riibe said in court Tuesday. “It was really tough.”
Riibe, a native of Iowa, has said that he and Konanki waded into the water and were swept out to sea by a large wave. He said he managed to get them both back closer to shore and last saw her walking in knee-deep water back toward where they had left their personal items. He said he passed out, however, and when he awoke, he assumed she’d gone back to her hotel room.
Meanwhile, Konanki’s parents sent a letter to Dominican authorities asking them to declare their daughter dead. They said in the letter that they accepted Riibe’s explanation of what happened and believed that she had drowned accidentally since investigators have found no evidence of foul play, CrimeOnline reported.
They spoke with reporters outside their home in Loudon County, Virginia, on Tuesday but did not comment on Riibe’s hearing.
“It is with deep sadness, sadness and heavy, heavy heart, we are coming to the terms with the fact that our daughter has drowned,” Subbarayudu Konanki said, according to NBC News. “This is incredibly difficult for us to process.”
Konanki said that authorities showed the family how high the waves were at the time of his daughter’s disappearance and said that authorities “clarified that the person of interest is not a suspect from the beginning.”
