Police arrested 23-year-old illegal immigrant, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, on Friday and charged him with the rape and murder of Rachel Morin, a mother-of-five who was brutally killed on a hiking trail last year.
“Victor Hernandez did not come here to make a better life for himself or his family,” Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said. “He came here to escape the crime he committed in El Salvador. He came here and murdered Rachel and, God willing, no one else.”
Morin went missing in August after going for a walk along the Ma & Pa Trail in Maryland’s Harford County. Investigators believe that the suspect attacked Morin and dragged her into a drainage culvert, where he murdered her. DNA evidence at the crime scene connected the suspect to a 2023 home invasion in Los Angeles, in which he assaulted a 9-year-old girl.
“Now with the new DNA evidence we knew who he is but we didn’t know where he was,” Gahler said.
Authorities found Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and issued his arrest warrant on Friday.
“At one point when things looked really bleak and hopeless, the lead detective told me, ‘Patience will win in the end,'” Morin’s mother, Patricia, said during the news conference. “I’m very thankful and very grateful.”
Hernandez illegally came to the U.S. in February 2023 just after murdering a young woman in El Salvador in January 2023, for which Interpol has issued a warrant for Hernandez’s arrest. Gahler said the suspect has gang ties and that “hopefully he’ll never have the opportunity to walk free again.”
“It is my understanding that this suspect, this monster, fled to the United States illegally, after committing the brutal murder of a young woman in El Salvador, a month earlier, in January of 2023. Once in our country, and likely emboldened by his anonymity, he brutally attacked a 9-year-old girl and her mother, during a home invasion in March of 2023 in Los Angeles,” Gahler said in a press conference this weekend.
“I want to now direct these comments to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and to every member in both chambers of Congress,” he continued. “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. This is the second time in just two years that an innocent Harford County woman has lost her life to a criminal in our country illegally.”
In January, Harford authorities arrested a 17-year-old illegal immigrant also from El Salvador, for murdering 20-year-old local Kayla Hamilton.
Hernandez’s arrest comes after Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered on a Georgia running trail by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. The suspect, Jose Ibarra, 26, was recently indicted by a grand jury with charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault with intent to rape, and more.