A fugitive from El Salvador, who authorities say had fled to the United States after killing a young woman in his home country, has been charged in the murder and rape of a Maryland woman, law enforcement officials said over the weekend.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 23, remained held without bond Sunday. Officials recently linked him through DNA to the murder of Rachel Hannah Morin last year, according to Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler. Martinez-Hernandez had crossed into the United States unlawfully in February 2023, Gahler said, and was known to have spent time in Maryland, Virginia, Los Angeles and finally Tulsa, where he was apprehended late Friday.
The death of Morin in August drew wide attention. A mother of five, she had gone for a walk on the Ma and Pa Heritage Trail, about 20 miles northeast of Baltimore, but did not return. Her car was found parked at the entrance, and her boyfriend reported her missing that night.
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“My heart is broken for the Morin family — as is our entire state,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) said Sunday when asked about the case and Martinez-Hernandez’s past.
“We know that we have got to fix a broken immigration policy. And we know that we need Congress to act on this,” Moore said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
An attorney representing the victim’s family was even more pointed.
“Americans keep dying because the politicians in Washington can’t solve the problem,” Randolph Rice said in an interview Sunday. “Rachel would be alive today if politicians would stop this flow of illegal immigrants.”
Law enforcement officials have also linked Martinez-Hernandez to a home-invasion assault in Los Angeles in March last year that left a 9-year-old girl and her mother injured.
“If there are other victims, we want them to come forward,” Rice said.
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Rice said Morin’s mother and other family members did not want to comment over the weekend as they were still processing the developments. “They feel relief — a sense the worry that he is out there has gone away, and they can now move to the part of this guy being tried,” Rice said.
Tulsa police said that Martinez-Hernandez was arrested Friday night. He remained at the Tulsa County Jail on Sunday, and has holds there from the Harford County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to online records. Jail records didn’t list an attorney for Martinez-Hernandez.
Those records spelled his name as Victor Martinez-Hernandez; the Harford County Sheriff’s Office and the Tulsa Police Department spelled his name as Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection could not be reached for comment Sunday.
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Gahler, the Harford sheriff, said he expects Martinez-Hernandez to be extradited to Maryland soon to face charges. “I never want him to leave Maryland again. I want him to die in [the] Maryland prison system,” Gahler said.
Fairly early in the case, Harford investigators linked the Aug. 5, 2023, killing of Morin with a potential suspect in Los Angeles.
That was because DNA evidence from the scene along the Ma and Pa Heritage Trail matched the DNA collected from a home burglarized earlier in Los Angeles — on March 26 — when a young girl and her mother were assaulted, officials said.
A doorbell-camera video released by officials showed a shirtless man exiting a Los Angeles home where the assault allegedly took place. And when the DNA evidence from Maryland was entered in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, it matched that of the burglary and assault suspect in Los Angeles, officials said.
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At a news conference Saturday, Bill DelBagno, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Baltimore Field Office, said that an “investigative genetic genealogy team” worked to identify the suspect and that investigators went to El Salvador as part of the case.
The case is the second homicide in two years in Harford committed by a person who had entered the country unlawfully, Gahler said. He invoked larger immigration concerns — speaking directly to the White House and Congress.
“I want to now direct these comments to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to every member in both chambers of Congress,” he said. “We are 1,800 miles away here in Harford County. We are 1,800 miles away from the southern border, and the American citizens are not safe because of failed immigration policies.”
