Running in fear: Laken Riley's murder echoes the perils of female runners everywhere

One autumn evening in 2017, while sitting in a packed psychology lecture at my undergraduate university, I received an unsettling email. 

“Greetings,” read the subject line, which had come from an account associated with the university. My mind immediately slotted it amongst the many generic salutations students often received from college deans, campus safety, dining halls and resident advisors — but then I began to read. 

The email was from a middle-aged man I’d spent the better part of the last few weeks blocking and re-blocking on Facebook after he persistently messaged me from different accounts to initiate communication. I knew his name — the same soldered to the email’s sign-off — and had a vague idea of what he looked like. What I didn’t know until that moment was that he was a university affiliate who claimed to have met me in several places around campus the year prior (a lie.) 

He wrote how he’d watched me outside the campus gym as I prepared to leave for a run. He told me that seeing I was a runner had prompted him to look me up online, before proceeding to rattle off ill-conceived praise about my athletic accomplishments.

As a member of my college’s cross country and track team, I typically ran through the red-bricked quad with a gaggle of other teammates. This was one of the saving graces of running through Manhattan as women, often clad in nothing more than sports bras and spandex shorts with the surface area of paper napkins: numbers. Men were less likely to leer or make vulgar comments when we ran in a homogenous mass of sinewy calves and swinging ponytails. 

Running alone, however, was a different story. 

At the time I received this man’s email, I was very much running alone. The majority of women in my designated training group were injured, meaning essentially all of my workouts — be they a light amble through Riverside Park or hill intervals near Henry Hudson Parkway — were done solo. In addition to that, our practices were at set times each weekday, easily memorizable for someone who wanted to track my daily whereabouts, the routes I took, and the most isolated parts of my journey. 

I’d never seen, more or less encountered this person in my life. I had no idea where he’d observed me from, or how often. His clandestine congratulations, imbued with a tone that was meant to make me feel flattered, had left me riddled with fear and anxiety. It felt like a portentous omen, a written warning that I would continue to be stalked and intimidated by the male gaze, maybe for the rest of my life. One man’s email was enough to make me feel utterly imperiled, to set my mind adrift in some quiet and cold void, indefinitely unmoored. I try not to let my mind unspool regarding his potential actions. 

My experience with this “watcher” happened when I was 19, around the same age as 22-year-old Laken Riley, the nursing student who was recently murdered while jogging near a lake at the University of Georgia in Athens. A 26-year-old man, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was charged with Riley’s murder last week. The motive remains unclear, but there is no justification to warrant the violence done to her — no explanation that will be sufficient to qualify the terror she must have felt in her final moments, while engaged in an act she presumably loved mere seconds before. 

Some conservatives, including Donald Trump, have already attempted to use Ibarra’s status as a Venezuelan immigrant who previously entered the U.S. illegally as political fodder, molding it to fit the GOP’s prior complaints about President Biden’s border policies. Not only do these sorts of claims advance racist rhetoric — a lá Trump’s “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country” vitriol — but they detract from the more central issue of perpetuated male violence. 

Perhaps one of the most sobering aspects of Riley’s death is that it happened on a college campus, a space that should be a bastion of safety for young adults after leaving their parents’ homes. Previously an undergraduate student at UGA, Riley was enrolled in a nursing program at Athens University when she was killed. I’m certain the Lake Herrick Trail, where Riley was running at the time of her death, was one she frequented often. I’m sure she knew the dips and divots in the path, the sensation of her footfall treading a well-known circuit. I’m sure she had a favorite route, that she was familiar with the lake’s sounds and smells during each of the seasons. I’m sure she laughed and cried and contemplated her future there.

There’s something deeply disquieting about a latent threat lurking in the places we deem to be safe and secure. 

And yet, this is the reality of running as a woman. Cities, suburbs, rural roads — male violence and harassment manifest ubiquitously, anywhere we run. For female runners, Laken Riley’s death renews the grim reminder that at any moment of any day, it could be one of us. 

Some may recall the high-profile case of Eliza Fletcher, the schoolteacher and mother who was kidnapped and fatally shot while out for an early-morning run in Memphis, Tennessee in September of 2022. Or Mollie Tibbetts, the University of Iowa student who disappeared during an evening run in the summer of 2018, only to be found dead in a cornfield. Or Sydney Sutherland, a nurse from Arkansas who was on a jog when she was kidnapped in August of 2020 by a farmer before he raped and killed her. There are many, many more.

Unfortunately, missing women are not a novelty. Each of the aforementioned cases signifies a tragic loss of life, gratuitously cut short by a man who felt entitled to take and assault a woman. They’re also a stark reminder of how racial bias affects who we deem worth finding. 

Fletcher, Tibbetts, and Sutherland were all white women, playing into a media phenomenon — “Missing White Woman Syndrome” —  that spotlights such cases over those related to missing persons of color. In 2022, more than 546,000 missing persons were reported missing in the U.S. by the National Crime Information Center, including more than 271,000 women. Data from the NCIC showed that Black women and girls account for 18 percent of all missing persons cases, despite only making up 7 percent of the population. U.S. Native women are murdered at rates ten times the national average, according to PBS. For Latino communities, the way many major criminal justice databases amalgamate white and Hispanic people creates an additional issue. Within the NCIC, “​​Hispanic is only listed as an ethnicity, not a specific race, making it optional for police to include,” said Laura Barrón-López, the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour. “Last year, of the more than 271,000 total entries under missing females, 21,759 women were categorized as Hispanic. But in the overall database, the optional ethnicity field was filled out in less than 20 percent of cases.”

Regardless of racial disparities, however, feeling unsafe while running is an indiscriminate experience that affects all women. Last March, sports company Adidas surveyed 9,000 women across nine countries to analyze men’s and women’s perceptions of safety while running. The survey found that 92% of women were concerned about their safety, with half stating they were worried about being physically attacked, compared to 28% of men. 

Over a third of women who participated in the survey indicated that they had experienced physical or verbal harassment, including being honked at, followed, or receiving sexual comments and sexual attention. And in 2017, a survey conducted by Runner’s World yielded similar findings, in which “60 percent of surveyed women of women reported to have been harassed when running, 25 percent said they had been regularly subjected to sexist comments or unwanted sexual advances, and six percent said they had felt threatened to such an extent by harassment while running that they feared for their lives.” 

Notably, and unsurprisingly, 90% of the women who responded to the survey indicated that the harassment had come from men. 

And yet, for many women, it’s not merely the fear of being physically attacked or sexually harassed for wearing form-fitting workout gear. The psychological toll inflicted by some men is an indisputable aspect of being a female runner. Adidas’ data confirmed that women were much more likely than men to suffer mental and physical side effects — over half of women experiencing anxiety in contrast to over a third of men. The study also saw that women had a loss of interest in running, in comparison to one in three men.

After my incident with the “watcher,” and during plenty of other instances in which I’ve received drive-by lechery, I’ve experienced intense anxiety. Often, I stop running outdoors for an indefinite period. Despite increasingly warmer, smoggier summers, I rarely shed my shirt to run in just my sports bra. I’ve started wearing baseball caps when I run alone — hiding my face feels like I’m inviting less attention. If all men can see of me is my body, and not my face, maybe that somehow suffuses the harassment, my illusory logic says, dispersing and dulling it. Maybe it will be easier to accept, to pretend to use my phone anytime I’m waiting at a stoplight, physically unable to run away from peering eyes until the light flashes green. Wearing headphones is great for drowning out the unending refrain of honking horns and lewd remarks, but it jeopardizes my being able to hear if someone is sneaking up behind me, poised to disfigure my skull, the way Laken Riley’s was. 

It’s gruesome and galling, yes. But women runners have acclimatized. It’s our lived reality.