Exclusive | Sudiksha Konankis hometown sheriff doesnt believe Joshua Riibe was complicit in Pitt students death
CHANTILLY, Virginia — The sheriff in missing Pitt student Sudiksha Konanki’s hometown doesn’t believe that Joshua Riibe was complicit in her disappearance — though US investigators still want Dominican authorities to keep working the case.Riibe was the last person to see Konanki, 20, alive after apparently meeting her at a bar in Punta Cana, where she was partying where with her girlfriends on a spring break trip on early March 6.
Dominican authorities have said he is a “person of interest” in the case and have put him under police guard and seized his passport.However, the Loudon County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia sent investigators to the Dominican Republic and interviewed Riibe.As a result, detectives do not think he is responsible for her disappearance, Loudoun County Sheriff’s spokesman Thomas Julia told The Post.“Is he in any way complicit in any of this? And even if he’s not complicit in any way, and we don’t believe he is, we’ve interviewed him, and he was very cooperative,” Loudoun County Sheriff’s spokesman Thomas Julia exclusively told The Post.
“We believe he just struggles with his memory in the pre-dawn hours when you’re in a particular state of mind after going through a near-drowning yourself, you may indeed have passed out,” Julia said of Riibe.Riibe, a 22-year-old college senior from Iowa, said he last saw Konanki while kissing her as the two swam in the ocean but soon after drunkenly passed out on the beach and could not say what happened to her.Julia questioned how much time passed between when Riibe last saw Konanki to when he passed out — a key missing piece of information that would likely help investigators determine what happened to her.“Was it a moment? Was it seconds? And that correspondingly bears on, could she have had a chance to get out and then somehow disappeared without his knowledge?” Julia said.“So that’s why all of this is very important, to try to understand the exact timeline as b...