What Happens When Trump Exploits Your Daughter’s Murder

[Rotadom]

When Mollie Tibbetts was killed by an undocumented immigrant,
Trump tried to hijack her story. Her mom says his divisiveness “has got to stop”

BROOKLYN, Iowa — It’s been more than six years since Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old studying at the University of Iowa, was murdered near her family’s house. Her mother, Laura Calderwood, says that in the years since, every night she is at home, she still walks down her second-floor hall to turn on the light in Mollie’s bedroom, and then closes Mollie’s door.

“She was such a reader,” Calderwood says. “She read at night.… She read all kinds of books all the time.… Anne Frank’s diary was one of her favorite books ever.”

Before she goes to bed, Calderwood makes sure to go back, open the door, and flip the light switch off for Mollie — in a room she feels will always, in life or death, be her daughter’s room.

As any mother who has lost a child would, Calderwood thinks about her daughter every day. “It never goes away,” she says. And how could it?

Unlike most mothers who lose a young child to tragedy or homicide in this nation, Calderwood didn’t simply live every parent’s absolute worst nightmare. She lived it as it played out across the country’s media landscape, only to then have an entire political party and the then-leader of the free world attempt to co-opt her family’s suffering in service of an election-year strategy.



Calderwood couldn’t escape it — not even on the day of her daughter’s funeral.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...s-daughter-mollie-tibbetts-murder-1235149834/