The “main reason” 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts’ murder is receiving national attention is because of “racism,” a former editor for the New York Times claims.

In a column for the New York Times, David Leonhardt — who previously wrote for the Times‘ Washington bureau — says the only reason Americans care about the death of Tibbetts at the hands of an illegal alien is because they are racist.

Leonhardt writes:

The main reason that Mollie Tibbetts’s horrible killing has received so much attention is racism. Tibbetts’s accused murderer is a Mexican immigrant, and large segments of the conservative media, including talk radio and Fox News, like to call attention to crimes committed by people with dark skin. It’s silly to pretend otherwise. You’ll notice the pattern if you spend any time watching or listening to these media sources. The pattern becomes especially clear when they descend into falsehoods.

Tibbetts is the Brooklyn, Iowa college student who dreamed of being a writer before allegedly being murdered and stabbed to death by 24-year-old illegal alien Cristhian Bahena-Rivera.

Bahena-Rivera has been charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’ death after police say surveillance footage reveals that he chased the young woman and was the last person to see her on the night of July 18, when she first went missing.

Tibbetts’ body was found this month in a cornfield, where police say Bahena-Rivera dumped her and covered her remains in cornstalks to avoid being found.

Once it was revealed that Tibbetts’ alleged killer was an illegal alien, the establishment media quickly scrubbed the story from their front pages, even though the story of Tibbetts having gone missing led much of the news cycle for weeks.

The New York Times, for instance, placed the story of Tibbetts’ alleged killer at the bottom of their homepage website, while CNN conveniently left out the fact that Bahena-Rivera is an illegal alien from their headline.