“I don’t know what’s going on,” his uncle, Eustaquio “Capi” Bahena Radilla, said in an interview Thursday conducted through an interpreter at his trailer home in Brooklyn. “I don’t know what’s happening because honestly, I know he’s a good person.”
Rivera’s father echoed his comment, saying Thursday that he believed that his son was innocent and calling reports of his confession “pure lies.”
“If he had done what they say he did, he would have come back here [to Mexico],” Eduardo Bahena Radilla, his father, said in a telephone interview from Guayabillo, a small town in Mexico. “But he’s innocent, so he didn’t run and hide.”
“He seemed calm,” Bahena said. “I didn’t sense anything was wrong.”
Around his 16th birthday, Rivera left Guayabillo to find work in the United States, his father said.
“There are no jobs here, so he left,” Bahena said, adding that his son crossed the border illegally and was undocumented in the United States.
He settled in Iowa because his uncle was already living there, Bahena said. He found work on a series of milk farms and often sent money back to his parents in Mexico.
More from his family and a friend of Mollie’s who was “friends” with CR on FB
She and Mollie were part of a chat group.
Suspect’s relatives say they’re baffled by arrest in Mollie Tibbetts case
