Just two blocks from the University of Georgia campus, in a downtown courtroom in Athens, Georgia, Jose Ibarra is on trial for the murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley, a former UGA student who transferred to the nursing program at Augusta University’s Athens campus.

In late February, Riley was attacked during her morning jog on a trail near the University of Georgia’s intramural fields. As the investigation and trial unfolded, members of the Athens community grappled with a shaken sense of security.

“Just because we’re on campus doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the bad parts of the world can’t get in,” said Allison Mawn, a fourth-year student. “She did everything right. She told friends where she was going, she went on a popular trail during the day. She had her tracking location on. She even managed to call for help, and still it wasn’t enough.”

The case was thrust into the national spotlight when authorities arrested Ibarra, an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant who entered the country two years ago, and charged him with murdering Riley. In the midst of the election cycle, her death quickly became a flashpoint in the immigration debate, with former President Donald Trump and his supporters raising it at rallies and President Biden responding to heckling about it in his State of the Union address.

“In an instant, all the eyes across the country are on us,” said Mawn. “Now you can’t say the name Laken Riley without thinking about undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration.”

Students have organized vigils and prayer groups, and participated in protests, rallies and runs in memory of Riley. A GoFundMe set up by her family amassed over $250,000 in donations that will go to the Laken Hope Foundation, an organization that will “promote safety awareness for women, aid and tuition assistance for nursing students, and children’s healthcare… all causes that Laken felt strongly about.”

For many students, Athens no longer feels like the safe haven they once thought it was. To ease fears, University of Georgia President Jere Morehead announced a $7.3 million campus safety initiative. The campus has been fortified by an expanded university police force, hundreds of additional lights and security cameras and multiple emergency call stations and license plate readers.

Over the past months, “there was an expectation that we would magnify those efforts,” said P. Daniel Silk, the University of Georgia’s associate vice president for public safety. “We want to be more safe and more secure tomorrow than we were yesterday.”

While the Athens community waits for justice to be delivered, students bustle around campus, walking under the newly installed street lights, passing by additional emergency call systems and easing into a heightened security presence. Classes may go on, but the campus and community are changed.

“Regardless of what the verdict is, unfortunately we still lost a student. We still lost a life and nothing’s gonna change that,” said Mawn. “Things are never going to be a hundred percent the same for any of us here.”

Nine Senate Democrats sent an urgent letter Wednesday imploring the nation’s top auto safety regulator to “accelerate the implementation” of several potentially lifesaving vehicle safety measures called for in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly referred to as the bipartisan infrastructure bill. 

Among the outstanding provisions was an order from Congress that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration draft a new standard for the strength of vehicle seats — a measure prompted by a long-running CBS News investigation.

“The agency must still finalize some of its proposed rules and has not yet issued rules for many provisions — rules that are already overdue or nearing their statutory deadline,” the senators wrote in the letter.

Sens. Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Ben Ray Lujan, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Jack Reed, Ron Wyden and Chris Van Hollen sent the letter to NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman asking for response by Dec 15. 

The NHTSA does not currently have an administrator to head the agency, a post that has been vacant for most of the last two administrations.

Since 2015, CBS News reports have brought to light longstanding concerns over seatback safety and exposed dire weaknesses within the federal standard, which was created in 1967. The probe found that front seats in vehicles were vulnerable to collapsing in crashes in which those vehicles had been rear-ended, even though the seat construction adhered to national requirements.

NHTSA was given two years to develop new safety standards for seat strength, primarily in an effort to protect children sitting in the back seats of vehicles. Fatal incidents in which front seats collapsed backward in rear-end accidents, and onto kids seated behind them, had already been on the rise for years. 

NHTSA missed the deadline, but in July, it announced its plans to potentially update that safety standard. While it sought public comments, the agency has not announced further action.

“It’s unacceptable that backseat passengers – especially children – are still at risk of being killed by a collapsing front seat during a crash,” Markey said in a statement. “After Senator Blumenthal and I passed our Modernizing Seatback Safety Act, and doggedly urged NHTSA to act, I was glad the agency finally issued its proposed rule updating seatback safety standards. But our work is not done yet, and NHTSA must quickly finalize this rule and save lives.”

Other outstanding safety provisions the senators are seeking status reports on include an annual recall completion list, automatic shutoff for vehicles with keyless ignition systems, setting minimum standards for crash avoidance systems, distracted driver reduction research, updates to hood and bumper standards, a study of existing reporting requirements for vehicle manufacturers regarding potential safety issues, requirements for new vehicles to be equipped with advanced impaired driving prevention technology and a requirement aimed at reducing the likelihood a child is left in a hot car by equipping new vehicles with a system to alert the driver to check rear seats.

Columbia, S.C. — Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother convicted of killing her two sons by rolling her car into a lake in 1994 with the boys strapped in their seats inside, will ask a parole board for her freedom on Wednesday.

Smith, 53, is serving a life sentence after a jury convicted her of murder but decided not to sentence her to death. Under state law at the time, she is eligible for a parole hearing every two years now that she has spent 30 years behind bars.

Smith will make her case for freedom to the seven-member parole board by video link from prison. Then she will go offline and her ex-husband and father of the children, as well as the prosecutor at her murder trial, will argue that she remain incarcerated.

Smith killed 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex because a man she was having an affair with suggested the boys were the reason they didn’t have a future together, prosecutors said.

A decision to grant parole requires a two-thirds vote of board members present at the hearing, according to the state Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services. Parole in South Carolina is granted only about 8% of the time and is less likely with an inmate’s first appearance before the board, in notorious cases or when prosecutors and the families of victims are opposed.

How the case unfolded  

Smith made international headlines in October 1994 when she said she was carjacked late at night near the city of Union and that a man drove away with her sons inside. Smith, who is white, said the carjacker was Black.

For nine days, Smith made numerous and sometimes tearful pleas asking that Michael and Alex be returned safely. The whole time, the boys were in Smith’s car at the bottom of nearby John D. Long Lake, authorities said.

Investigators said Smith’s story didn’t add up. Carjackers usually just want a vehicle, so investigators asked why would they let Smith out but not her kids. The traffic light where Smith said she had stopped when her car was taken would only be red if another car was waiting to cross, and Smith said no other cars were around. Other bits and pieces of the story didn’t make sense.

Smith ultimately confessed to letting her car roll down a boat ramp and into the lake. A re-creation by investigators showed it took six minutes for the Mazda to dip below the surface, while cameras inside the vehicle showed water pouring in through the vents and steadily rising. The boys’ bodies were found dangling upside-down in their car seats, one tiny hand pressed against a window,

Prosecutors said Smith was having an affair with the wealthy son of the owner of the business she worked at. He broke it off because she had the two young sons.

Smith’s lawyers said she was remorseful, was suffering a mental breakdown and intended to die alongside her children but left the car at the last moment.

In July 2015, 20 years after her conviction, Smith told The State newspaper in Columbia she never planned to kill them and instead intended to end her own life.

The 1995 trial of the young mother became a national sensation and a true crime touchstone even though it wasn’t televised by a judge who worried about what cameras were doing to the O.J. Simpson murder trial going on at the same time. Her lawyers worked to save her life, noting that Smith’s father had killed himself and that her stepfather was having sex with her along with the owner of the business where she worked.

Unusual actions in prison  

From prison, Smith can make phone calls and answer text messages, many coming from journalists and interested men. Those messages and phone calls were released under South Carolina’s open records act, something Smith didn’t initially realize could happen. She said the invasion of her privacy upset her along with the public revelation that she was juggling conversations about the future with several men.

Some men know why she is famous. Others are more coy. One told her he was going to use the dates of her birthday and those of her dead sons when he played the Powerball lottery. Others chatted about their lives and sports. Many promised her a home on the outside and a happy life.

Smith says in some of the messages she still grieves for her children.

“I am really sad today and just want to hang out in the bed. Today is my youngest son’s birthday, he would have been 30 today. Hard to believe,” Smith wrote in August 2023.

Smith also had sex with guards. And she violated prison policies by giving out contact information for friends, family members and her ex-husband to a documentary producer who discussed paying her for her help, according to former prosecutor Tommy Pope.

“The jury believed she got a life sentence and that’s what she should serve,” Pope said last month shortly after the parole hearing was announced.

Pope, who’s now a representative in the South Carolina legislature, told CBS Columbia affiliate WLTX-TV he doesn’t expect Smith to get parole — or want her to.

“She has been continually focused on Susan, not on Michael and Alex, I think Susan’s remorseful, but remorseful that she’s in her circumstances — not remorseful for the pain she caused Michael and Alex, or equally importantly David Smith (the boy’s father) and his family,” he said.