College senior Joshua Riibe, who was a person of interest in the disappearance of a Pitt student in the Dominican Republic, is back stateside and, according to reports, is staying at his family home in Iowa.
Joshua’s mother Tina spoke briefly with the Daily Mail, giving an update on her son. “It was a really sad situation. Josh is resting up right now,” she told the English tabloid. Tina would not say if Joshua was returning to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, where he is in his senior year studying land surveying. “We are keeping that to ourselves,” she said. “It’s been a long travel.”
Riibe was confined to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, his passport and cell phone confiscated for two weeks while he was questioned by authorities over the disappearance of Sudiksha Konanki, a 20-year-old pre-med student that he met while vacationing on the island before she disappeared. The 22-year-old Riibe told investigators that he and Konanki went swimming in front of the hotel where they were both staying in the early morning hours of March 6th. The seas were rough at the time, and Riibe said he pulled her out of the deep water to where it was knee-high before he passed out on the shore, still inebriated from the night of partying that his and her groups of friends engaged in throughout the night. Riibe would wake up on the shore hours later. Dominican authorities never named him a suspect nor arrested him, describing him only as a person of interest.
Konanki’s parents would eventually ask Dominican authorities to let Riibe go and to declare their daughter dead, convinced that she had drowned based on the evidence presented to them by investigators. “It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that we are coming to terms with the fact our daughter has drowned,” her father said from their family home in Virginia. “This is incredibly difficult for us to process.”
