Rodney White, rodwhite@dmreg.com 
 
 Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, is lead from the courtroom after making his initial appearance on a charge of first-degree murder during at the Poweshiek County Courthouse in Montezuma, Iowa, on Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018. A little more than 24 hours earlier, investigators announced that Tibbetts' body had been found and that her suspected killer had been charged with first-degree murder. Rivera made his initial court appearance Wednesday in a rural Iowa courthouse on a first-degree murder charge in the death of 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts. They said the 24-year-old worked under a different name and was a good employee who helped take care of their cows and got along with co-workers. Even after Tibbetts disappeared on July 18 while out for an evening run in the small central Iowa town of Brooklyn, Rivera kept coming to work and "nobody saw a difference" in his demeanor, said Dane Lang, the manager of Yarrabee Farms. His colleagues were stunned Tuesday to learn that he was not only the suspect in Tibbetts' death, but that he had a different real name than what he went by on the farm, Lang said. "We continue to cooperate with the investigation, and we have provided information about our former employee, including his hiring records, to authorities," Craig Lang said during a press conference on the farm on Wednesday. The information is required to file a Form I-9, which verifies the identity and employment eligibility of a person in the U.S. 
 
 As a voluntary second verification step, the business put Rivera's information through the Social Security Administration’s number verification service, but Dane Lang said he and others assumed it was E-Verify.gov. Rivera showed up to work on time, cooperated with the other employees and showed up every day, he said. "Remember this as a time that a country came together for just one girl," he said. Yarrabee Farms is a small family farming operation that dates back to 1860 and has been owned for six generations by the Lang family, which is prominent in the community, farming circles and Republican politics. Dane Lang said the farm had received dozens of disturbing phone calls and messages since the employee's arrest, including threats to kill his dog and burn down his buildings. "This is a really scary situation," he said. His father and farm co-owner Craig Lang, a former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau who ran earlier this year for state agriculture secretary, said the farm was cooperating with investigators and had already turned over Rivera's hiring records. Tibbetts studied psychology when she was at UI; she was an advocate for mental health and genuinely cared about how people thought, Goodman said.
– One of roughly 10 employees at Yarrabee Farms in rural Poweshiek County, Iowa, the 24-year-old lived in a mobile home on the property, always showed up for work, and got along with his co-workers as he took care of the cows over the course of four years. It was only Tuesday that his employers learned his real name. Cristhian Rivera, accused of killing 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, used a different name associated with an out-of-state government ID and matching Social Security card when he got a job at the dairy farm through a former girlfriend in 2014, reports the Des Moines Register. When the information was run though the Social Security Administration's verification service, everything checked out, farm manager Dane Lang tells the AP. But "our employee was not who he said he was," adds Lang, son of farm co-owner and prominent Republican Craig Lang. "This was shocking to us." Immigration officials now suspect Rivera was in the US illegally. Per the AP, a Facebook page in his name gives his hometown as Guayabillo, Mexico, a community of less than 500. The AP adds Rivera's attorney, Allan Richards, on Wednesday said he might argue his client was here legally, saying Rivera had been in the US since he was a minor and paid taxes. But Richards did say he hadn't verified Rivera's immigration status. At a vigil at the University of Iowa where Tibbetts would've started her sophomore year on Monday, her brother had one request for the hundreds gathered: make a friend. "You can always attribute that friendship … to my sister, and that would mean the world to her," he said, per the Register.