The man accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has waived his right to a jury, paving the way for his bench trial, which is expected to begin Friday morning.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, of Athens, Georgia, was indicted on charges including three counts of felony murder and counts of malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with intent to rape and "peeping Tom."

Riley’s killing and Ibarra’s arrest set off a political firestorm, with Republicans, including Donald Trump, pointing to Riley’s death in calls for tougher border policies as part of a broader crackdown on immigration.

In a bench trial, the judge will ultimately decide whether the defendant is guilty or innocent, without the help of a jury. The trial is expected to start at 9 a.m. Friday.

Prosecutors are seeking life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Riley, 22, was found dead with "visible injuries" on Feb. 22 in a forested area behind Lake Herrick on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. She had gone out for a jog, and when she did not return, her friends called the police.

Police said at the time that the cause of death was blunt force trauma.

There was no indication the suspect knew the victim, University Police Chief Jeff Clark said at the time. He also said the suspect did not have an extensive violent criminal background.

Clark described Riley’s killing as a "crime of opportunity, where he saw an individual and bad things happened," and said the killing appeared to be a solo act.

Attorneys for Ibarra did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night.

Riley was a student at the Augusta University College of Nursing's Athens campus, according to the school. The University of Georgia said Riley had been a student through the 2023 spring semester before she transferred to Augusta University.

At the time of Riley’s killing, Ibarra was living in an apartment complex less than a mile from the University of Georgia campus.

Ibarra is a Venezuelan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 near El Paso, Texas, officials have said.

Riley's father, Jason Riley, told NBC News in March he felt that fact distracted from who his daughter was and feared her death was being exploited as a political talking point ahead of the presidential election.

"I think it's being used politically to get those votes," he said. "It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they're just using my daughter's name for that. And she was much better than that, and she should be raised up for the person that she is. She was an angel."

"She was only 22. She had a lot of life left to give to the world," he said. "If everybody could live like Laken it would make the world a better place.

 Americans had a pandemic on their minds back in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that stimulated the slack economy and averted a government shutdown. Tucked inside the bill, however, was another bit of business entirely—a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding “unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).” Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass legislation in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage of UAP sightings that the Navy had declassified earlier that year and that had been burning down the internet ever since. 

The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics—loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. None of the objects produced detectable exhaust. Some turned with a suddenness that would have produced g-forces deadly to any human being who might be aboard. Others dove into the ocean and then flew straight back out.

The military’s verdict? A shrug. The objects weren’t U.S. Air Force or Naval aircraft, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power—terrestrial or otherwise—was impossible to say.

“These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the New York Times in 2021. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “twelve hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Inauguration day for Trump’s second term is still more than two months away, but when the once-and-future president returns to Washington, he’ll find the mystery of UAPs again there waiting for him. 

On Nov. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” during which they heard from four witnesses who spent just over two hours making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American—and quite possibly unearthly—machines.

Let me be clear,” testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who spent 10 years running a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, “UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.”

What caused both the lawmakers and the witnesses at the hearing particular concern is not just the fact that the sightings keep occurring, but where they’re occurring—with a disproportionate share of them happening over military or other secure installations. Committee chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) put the question directly to Elizondo.

“I suppose, hypothetically, you could have incursions over just regular airports,” he said, “but is it obvious that these incursions are more likely over military facilities than over a random airport?”

“There is definitely enough data to suggest that there is some sort of relationship between sensitive U.S. military installations, also some of our nuclear equities, and some of our Department of Energy sites,” Elizondo answered. “This is not a new trend; this has been going on for decades and that information has been obfuscated, unfortunately, from folks like you in this committee, and I think that’s problematic.”

Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that the government is playing cute with what it knows or doesn’t know about the origin of UAPs. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was deployed off the east coast of the continental U.S. in Jan. 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that was declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other Naval officers received an email with the video attached—an email that vanished from all of their inboxes “without explanation” the next day. The anomalous object, he said, exhibited “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” For Gallaudet, the content of the video, not to mention its disappearance, served as “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity.”

Some of the most sensational claims of the two-hour session came from journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the news site Public on the Substack platform, who submitted 214 pages of testimony into evidence. Last month, Shellenberger published an article alleging that the government was running what he described in his testimony as “an active and highly secretive” program called Immaculate Constellation, which includes “hundreds, maybe thousands” of images and videos of UAPs. “And it’s not those fuzzy photos and videos we’ve been given,” he testified. “It’s very clear, very high resolution.”

Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator and a member of the space agency’s UAP independent study team, weighed in too, lamenting what he described as “the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions” about UAP. “Science requires data which should be collected without bias or prejudice, yet when the topic of UAP arises, those who wish to explore the phenomena are met by resistance and ridicule.”

That’s not only a disservice to public knowledge, but a risk to public safety—one that Gallaudet, with his military pedigree, was quick to point out. “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency,” he said. “In 2025, the U.S. will spend over $900 billion on national defense, yet we still have an incomplete understanding of what is in our airspace.”

Added Elizondo: “We are talking about technologies that can outperform anything we have in our inventory. And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure eclipsing that of 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”

Whatever the unexplained technology is, the witnesses stressed, it is the government’s responsibility not just to figure out its origin, but to share what it learns with the taxpaying public. “The intelligence community is treating us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.”

Mike Tyson said that "the devil himself" would show up Friday night in his boxing match against Jake Paul. He gave Paul a preview at Thursday's weigh-in.

Betting public backing Mike Tyson in return vs. Jake Paul

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  David Purdum, ESPN Staff WriterNov 14, 2024, 12:49 PM ET

The betting public is overwhelmingly siding with Mike Tyson for Friday's fight against Jake Paul that bookmakers say is on pace to be the most heavily bet boxing match in years.

The odds have been drifting toward Tyson this week, with sportsbooks reporting upward of 90% of the bets being on the underdog. Tyson, 58, has moved from +225 to +175 this week at ESPN BET, where Paul, 27, is listed as a -225 favorite.

The eight-round, sanctioned fight takes place Friday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and will be broadcast on Netflix.

While Tyson is garnering the majority of wagers, the bigger ones are on Paul, including a $1 million bet placed with Caesars Sportsbook by a bettor in Michigan at -220 odds. The bet would pay a net $454,000 if Paul wins.

DraftKings sportsbook director Johnny Avello told ESPN on Thursday that it had taken two $500,000 bets on Paul to win.

"As we got closer to the fight, we've started to see a lot of small bets on Tyson," Avello said. "Took a couple of big bets on Paul, but it's not going to overcome all the bets on Tyson."

BetMGM said in a release Tuesday that it expects Tyson-Paul to be the most bet-on boxing match in the online sportsbook's seven-year history, and Andrew Babakitis, a risk manager for the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas who oversees fight odds, said he has been shocked by the betting interest.

"It's pretty surprising to see how many people are still willing to take a shot on Mike Tyson at this age," Babakitis told ESPN on Wednesday.

Babakitis said the SuperBook had taken "several six-figure bets" on the fight, all of them on Paul. Big bets on Paul also showed up before the fight was postponed from July 15 to Nov. 15 due to a health issue with Tyson. The odds on the fight were in the same range before and after the postponement

Avello was a bookmaker for the 2017 Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather boxing match in Las Vegas, a fight that drew record betting interest, including five reported million-dollar wagers at Nevada sportsbooks. Avello said, with legal sportsbooks now operating in 38 states and the District of Columbia, Tyson-Paul might attract even more money from bettors, but he isn't expecting the million-dollar bets he saw on McGregor-Mayweather.

"For us, I think it certainly could be our biggest bout of the year," Avello said.

The most popular prop bet on the fight is for Tyson to win in the first round. Avello said DraftKings took so much action on Tyson in the first round that it moved the price from 22-1 to 12-1.

Tyson hasn't fought professionally in nearly 20 years. Paul, who rose to fame as a YouTube influencer, has amassed a 10-1 record in his boxing career.

Not all states are allowing betting on the fight because of a variety of factors, with the abstainers including New York, Colorado and Pennsylvania.

"I'm shocked at how much this fight is being bet," Babakitis said. "It almost feels like a joke, but it's not. There's some serious money on this thing."