Parents of missing Pitt student say they believe their daughter drowned in Dominican Republic
The parents of missing University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki said on Tuesday that they’ve given up hope that their daughter is still alive and believe she drowned while on a spring break trip in the Dominican Republic.
Konanki, 20, went missing while on a trip with five friends in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. She is believed to have been last seen on the beach in the early hours of March 6 before she vanished.
A weeks-long international investigation into her disappearance has largely come up short of answers. Addressing reporters outside of their home in Loudoun County, Virginia, Konanki’s parents said that drowning is the explanation for her disappearance.
“We are coming to terms with the fact that our daughter has drowned,” Konanki’s father, Subbarayudu Konanki, said through tears. “This is incredibly difficult for us to process.”
Konanki’s father said that U.S. and Dominican Republic authorities told the family that they also believe their daughter drowned, pointing to the ocean’s conditions on the morning she disappeared.
“Both sides of the authorities have shown us how high the ocean waves were at the time of [the] incident,” he said. “And both sides of the authorities also clarified that the person of interest is not suspect from the beginning.”
Konanki’s father appeared to be referring to Joshua Riibe, an American who was the last person believed to have been seen with Konanki on the morning she disappeared.
Riibe, a 22-year-old senior at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, told local authorities in an interview last week that he was on the beach with Konanki shortly before she disappeared, according to an interview transcript obtained by NBC News.
According to the transcript, which NBC News translated from Spanish, he and Konanki were “in waist-deep water, talking and kissing a little” before a wave crashed, taking them both “out to sea.”
Although he has not been charged with a crime, Riibe and his attorneys said his passport has been confiscated by local authorities and that he has been kept under supervision at the hotel where Konanki disappeared since March 6.
The Dominican Republic National Police said there are no suspects in Konanki’s disappearance.
A Dominican judge ruled on Tuesday that Riibe no longer needs to remain under police supervision. However, the judge said his courtroom was not the appropriate venue to resolve the matter of Riibe’s passport.
As Eduardo Velázquez, a prosecutor with the Dominican Republic AG’s office, returned to the courtroom ahead of the judge’s decision on Tuesday, NBC News asked him about Riibe‘s passport which prosecutors claim they do not have.
“I don’t know the passport,” Velázquez said. When pressed for answers, he responded — in English: “I don’t speak Spanish… er English sorry.”
Konanki’s mother appeared to be too grief-stricken to speak at length on Tuesday, but thanked the international media for its “help and cooperation.”
“We were going through too much pain all these days and we were saddened and we were not able to believe this,” Konanki’s father said. “Sorry, I cannot, I’m not able to speak anything on that because our heart is broken.”
Jesse Kirsch reported from Higüey and Matt Lavietes from New York.
