An FBI special agent testified Monday that electronic location data seems to place Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and the man accused of killing her in the same wooded area at the time of her death. Meanwhile, prosecutors also played a recording of Ibarra being grilled by his wife about the case during a jail phone call.

Jose Ibarra, 26, is charged with murder and other crimes in Riley’s death in February. He waived his right to a jury trial, meaning Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard is hearing the case and will alone decide on Ibarra’s guilt or innocence.

The killing of the 22-year-old woman added fuel to the national debate over immigration during this year’s presidential campaign when federal authorities said Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case.

FBI Special Agent James Burnie told the court Monday that he reviewed location data from Ibarra’s cellphone and Riley’s cellphone and smart watch. GPS data from Riley’s watch very precisely puts her inside the wooded area with running trails where her body was found on Feb. 22. Pings between Ibarra’s phone and cell towers and the fact his phone wasn’t making any Wi-Fi connections at the time indicate he was also likely in the woods, Burnie said.

Prosecutors also played a recording of a jail phone call from May between Ibarra and his wife, Layling Franco. FBI specialist Abeisis Ramirez, who translated the call from Spanish, testified that Ibarra told Franco that he had been at the University of Georgia looking for work, and that his wife repeatedly said she was fed up and that she wanted him to tell the truth.

Franco “continues to ask, ‘What happened with the girl?'” and said Ibarra “must know something,” Ramirez said. He responds: “Layling, enough.” Ramirez said Franco told Ibarra that it’s crazy that police only found his DNA.

Ibarra is charged with one count of malice murder, three counts of felony murder and one count each of kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, hindering an emergency telephone call, tampering with evidence and being a peeping Tom.

Ibarra took selfies of himself early on the day Riley was killed, according to testimony from an FBI agent who analyzed data from cellphones seized from the apartment where Ibarra lived with his two brothers and two other people. In the photos, Ibarra is wearing a black Adidas baseball cap and a dark hooded jacket.

A few hours before Riley was killed, a man in a black Adidas baseball cap was captured on surveillance video at the door of a first-floor apartment in a University of Georgia housing complex. A female graduate student who lived there testified Monday that she heard someone trying to get inside her apartment when she was in the shower. As she looked through the peephole, the person ducked and walked away, but then she saw the same person peering into her window, she said.

Police officers using a grainy screen shot from the surveillance video approached a man wearing a black Adidas cap the day after the killing. That turned out to be Diego Ibarra, one of Jose Ibarra’s brothers.

University of Georgia police Sgt. Joshua Epps testified that he was called to question Diego Ibarra outside the apartment where the Ibarras lived. Epps testified that the brother had no obvious recent injuries.

Outside the apartment, police also questioned Argenis Ibarra, Jose Ibarra and Rosbeli Elisbar Flores Bello. Epps and Corporal Rafael Sayan, who speaks Spanish and helped with the questioning, testified that they noticed scratches on Jose Ibarra.

When asked why his knuckles were red, Jose Ibarra told them it was because of the cold but didn’t really explain several scratches on his arms, Sayan said.

Security video from the apartment complex showed a man wearing a shirt with a distinctive pattern throwing something into a trash bin. A crime scene specialist from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation testified there was a lot of clothing in the one-room apartment but that she didn’t find that shirt in the apartment and didn’t find any bloody clothing.

A police officer testified Friday that he found a dark hooded jacket in the trash bin seen in the video and that testing revealed Riley’s blood on the hoodie.

Flores Bello identified the man in the video as Jose Ibarra and confirmed that identification on the witness stand Monday. She said she had previously seen him wearing the dark hooded jacket and thought it was strange that he threw it away.

Testifying through of an interpreter, Bello said she met Ibarra in Queens, New York. Ibarra’s brother, Diego, lived in Athens and had been urging Ibarra to move there, saying they would find work. She traveled with Ibarra to join his brother in Georgia. She said they went to the Roosevelt Hotel, which served as an intake center for migrants, to ask for a “humanitarian flight” to Georgia in September 2023. When they arrived in Atlanta, a friend of Diego Ibarra picked them up and drove them to Athens.

Riley was a student at Augusta University College of Nursing, which also has a campus in Athens, about 70 miles east of Atlanta.

Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, blamed Democratic President Joe Biden’s border policies for her death. As he spoke about border security during his State of the Union address weeks after the killing, Biden mentioned Riley by name.

In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray offered unusually expansive comments on Riley’s murder.

“I want to tell you how heartbroken I am — not just for the family, friends, classmates, and staff who are grieving Laken’s loss,” Wray told a group gathered at the University of Georgia. “I’m saddened to see that sense of peace shattered by Laken’s murder and the subsequent arrest of a Venezuelan national who’d illegally entered the country in 2022.” 

He said the FBI was doing “everything [it] can to help achieve justice for Laken.”

Parts of the Great Barrer Reef have suffered the highest coral mortality on record, Australian research showed Tuesday, with scientists fearing the rest of it has suffered a similar fate.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science said surveys of 12 reefs found up to 72 percent coral mortality, thanks to a summer of mass bleaching, two cyclones, and flooding.

In one northern section of the reef, about a third of hard coral had died, the “largest annual decline” in 39 years of government monitoring, the agency said.

Often dubbed the world’s largest living structure, the Great Barrier Reef is a 1,400-mile expanse of tropical corals that house a stunning array of biodiversity.

But repeated mass bleaching events have threatened to rob the tourist drawcard of its wonder, turning banks of once-vibrant corals into a sickly shade of white.

Bleaching occurs when water temperatures rise and the coral expels microscopic algae, known as zooxanthellae, to survive.

If high temperatures persist, the coral can eventually turn white and die.

This year had already been confirmed as the fifth mass bleaching on the reef in the past eight years.

But this latest survey also found a rapid-growing type of coral — known as acropora — had suffered the highest rate of death.

This coral is quick to grow, but one of the first to bleach.

Lead researcher Mike Emslie told public broadcaster ABC the past summer was “one of the most severe events” across the Great Barrier Reef, with heat stress levels surpassing previous events.

“These are serious impacts. These are serious losses,” he said.

World Wildlife Fund-Australia‘s head of oceans, Richard Leck, said the initial surveys confirmed his “worst fears.”

“The Great Barrier Reef can bounce back but there are limits to its resilience,” he said. “It can’t get repeatedly hammered like this. We are fast approaching a tipping point.”

Leck added the area surveyed was “relatively small” and feared that when the full report was released next year “similar levels of mortality” would be observed.

He said the findings reinforced Australia’s need to commit to stronger emission reduction targets of at least 90 percent below 2005 levels by 2035 and move away from fossil fuels.

The country is one of the world’s largest gas and coal exporters and has only recently set targets to become carbon neutral.

A man has pleaded guilty in the killings of a Georgia couple who were lured to their deaths nearly a decade ago, authorities say, after someone magnet fishing in a creek reeled in a rifle and other evidence linked to the cold case.

Ronnie Jay Towns pleaded guilty to the 2015 murders of Bud and June Runion and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Telfair County Sheriff Sim Davidson said in a statement Monday. 

The conclusion to the case came just months after someone using a magnet to fish in a Georgia creek pulled up a rifle as well as some of the Runions’ belongings in the same area where the couple was found murdered. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in April that driver’s licenses, credit cards and other items pulled from Horse Creek were “new evidence” in the murder case.

Officials said then that the magnet fisher had discovered a .22-caliber rifle — the same caliber as the gun used to kill the Runions. When the magnet fisher returned to the same spot two days later, they found a bag containing a cellphone, driver’s licenses and credit cards, which investigators said had belonged to Bud and June Runion.

The couple’s bodies were discovered off a county road in January 2015 and authorities said they had been robbed. Investigators said at the time that their bodies and their car had been found in three different locations, CBS affiliate WMAZ-TV reported.

Investigators said Towns lured the couple by replying to an online ad posted by 69-year-old Bud Runion seeking a classic car, though Towns didn’t actually own the car. Authorities said the couple drove three hours from their home in Marietta to Telfair County to look at the vehicle. They never returned.

Towns was eventually charged in the killings but his trial was delayed multiple times — once because too few jurors reported for jury duty when prosecutors took it to a grand jury, WMAZ-TV reported. He was indicted again in 2020, but the case was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, after the new evidence was pulled from the creek, Towns pleaded guilty and is now set to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“We are thankful to have closure in this case, and our prayers are with both families,” Sheriff Davidson said Monday.

People magnet fishing have pulled in other unexpected items in recent months. In June, a New York City couple said they used a magnet to reel in a safe containing two stacks of waterlogged $100 bills. The month before that, a magnet fisher reeled in a human skull padlocked to an exercise dumbbell from a New Orleans waterway.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.