An illegal immigrant from El Salvador has been charged with the brutal rape and murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five, on a hiking trail in Maryland last year.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 23, was arrested Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on murder charges.
“Rachel’s killer is no longer a free man and hopefully he will never have the opportunity to be free again,” Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Galle told reporters at a news conference Saturday.
The violent immigrant has ties to Salvadoran gangs and has been implicated in at least one other murder.
“Victor Hernandez did not come to this country to make a better life for him or his family, he came here to escape the crimes he committed in El Salvador. He came here to murder Rachel and God bless no one else,” Galle continued.
“But this should never happen.”
The New York Post reports:
The alleged murderer brutally murdered another young woman and illegally crossed into the United States in February 2023.
Martinez-Hernandez had been in the United States for six months when he allegedly attacked Maureen while she was walking alone on the Bel Air Mapa Heritage Trail.
Her naked body was so traumatized that her family said it looked like “her head had been smashed with rocks.”
About a month after the killing, police matched Martinez-Hernandez’s DNA to samples found at the scene of a Los Angeles home invasion and assault on a young girl.
Martinez-Hernandez is charged with first-degree murder and first-degree rape.
