Rachel Morin's mother recounts daughter's death: 'Rips out your heart'
Hear this story
The mother of Rachel Morin, the Maryland woman who was fatally attacked on a popular hiking trail in a Baltimore suburb in 2023, was invited to the White House, a day after a Salvadoran man was found guilty in the case that became a flashpoint during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, 24, was convicted of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, third-degree sex offense and kidnapping on April 14, according to the Harford County State's Attorney's Office. A Maryland jury deliberated for less than an hour before returning the guilty verdict, CBS Baltimore and The Baltimore Banner reported.
Rachel Morin's mother, Patty Morin, was invited as a "special guest" at an April 16 White House briefing. She shared details about her daughter and how she was attacked, noting that the hiking trail had been a "safe place" for their family.
"When she went on that trail that day, she was not planning on dying," she said. "She wasn't planning on walking to her death."
Authorities accused Martinez-Hernandez of killing Rachel Morin, 37, a mother of five who vanished in August 2023 while walking on the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in Bel Air, a town northeast of Baltimore. He was arrested in Oklahoma in June 2024 following a nationwide search.
Authorities also accused Martinez-Hernandez of entering the U.S. without authorization in February 2023 after allegedly killing a different woman in his home country of El Salvador. He was then linked to an assault in Los Angeles during a March 2023 home invasion through DNA evidence.
"This case shook our Harford County community and robbed a family of their daughter, sister, mother, and friend," Alison Healey, the Harford County State's Attorney, said in a statement. "It is my sincere hope that today's verdict brings some peace and closure to the entire Morin family."
Martinez-Hernandez is being held at the Harford County Detention Center without bail, according to online inmate records. The Harford County State's Attorney's Office said it "intends to seek the maximum penalty allowable by law," which includes life without the possibility of parole on the murder charge, a life sentence on the rape charge and additional years on the remaining charges.
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What happened to Rachel Morin?
Rachel Morin's boyfriend reported her missing when she failed to return home from her walk on the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail on Aug. 5, 2023, according to authorities. Morin was last seen on the trail at around 6 p.m., and her vehicle was found near the footpath.
The next day, Harford County Sheriff's deputies discovered Rachel Morin's body in a wooded area near the trail and said she was a "victim of a violent homicide."
Prosecutors alleged that Martinez-Hernandez had planned the attack and was waiting in the woods before attacking Rachel Morin shortly after she entered the trail. Health data on Rachel Morin's cell phone and Apple Watch showed that she was pulled about 150 feet from the main trail into the woods, prosecutors said.
Evidence presented during the trial revealed that Martinez-Hernandez concealed Rachel Morin in drainage culverts just off the trail, where she was beaten, raped and killed, according to prosecutors.
"(Morin) spent her day as she often did. Spending time with her children and boyfriend, working out at a local gym, running errands, and finally, taking a walk on the Ma & Pa trail," Healey said. "Witnesses testified that her time on the trail was 'her peace,' and she never could have predicted that on that day that she would never see or speak to her children again."
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) said the Harford County Sheriff's Office requested assistance from its Baltimore office on Aug. 17, 2023, and relayed information that a person of interest in the investigation had been involved in a home invasion in Los Angeles.
On that same day, authorities announced a DNA connection between Rachel Morin's suspected killer and a man who assaulted a girl and her mother during the home invasion. Prosecutors said DNA evidence that was recovered from parts of Rachel Morin's body also matched the DNA of the suspect.
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Attack leads to 10-month search for suspect
Rachel Morin's death shocked the community of Bel Air and sparked a 10-month nationwide search for the suspect.
On Sept. 7, 2023, the Harford County Sheriff's Office said in an update that investigators had "collected and watched hours of video footage" from the trail. Authorities later released a finalized sketch of the suspect on Feb. 12, 2024, but a name was not formally released.
HSI said the Maryland State Police Crime Lab notified the Harford County Sheriff's Office on June 14, 2024, that it had matched DNA recovered from Martinez-Hernandez's clothing to DNA recovered at the scene of Rachel Morin's murder.
Authorities were then able to track Martinez-Hernandez to a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and local police officers arrested him, according to HSI. He was booked into the Tulsa County Criminal Justice Center and later transferred to Maryland.
Prosecutors alleged that Martinez-Hernandez claimed he had never been to Maryland. But multiple witnesses and business records said he had been living and working in Bel Air at the time of the murder.
Following his arrest in Oklahoma, prosecutors said Martinez-Hernandez's phone was seized and authorities discovered photos and screenshots of Rachel Morin.
Patty Morin on her daughter's death: 'Rips out your heart'
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt introduced Patty Morin on April 16 after defending the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an unrelated case in which a Maryland man was wrongly removed from the country in March.
"If you're a mother here in the room, can you imagine standing there alive, you're alive, someone comes and puts their hands into your chest and rips out your heart," Patty Morin said of her daughter's death. "That's what it feels like."
A month after Martinez-Hernandez's arrest, Rachel Morin's family took the podium at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin to talk about losing their loved one, one in a series of speakers who shared their personal experiences with crime or substance abuse in the past four years.
"Joe Biden and his designated border czar, Kamala Harris, opened our borders to him and others like him, empowering him to victimize the innocent. Yet, to this day, we have not heard from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris," Michael Morin, a brother of Rachel Morin, told the crowd in Milwaukee in July 2024. "But when Rachel was killed, President Trump called my family to offer his condolences."
President Donald Trump, who came into office in January, has promised to reform U.S. immigration policy. He met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele on April 14, a leader praised by the administration for opening his country's prison system to alleged gang members and detainees that Trump wants out of the United States.
"I think he's doing a fantastic job, and he's taking care of a lot of problems that we have that we really wouldn't be able to take care of from a cost standpoint," Trump told reporters about Bukele, referring to the cost of imprisoning the detainees in El Salvador.
Contributing: Jonathan Limehouse and JJ Hensley, USA TODAY; Reuters
(This story was updated to add new information.)
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Most days, the prison is quiet, though on occasion hundreds of protesters show up to demand the release of its most famous inmate, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student whom the Trump Administration arrested without a warrant in March for his role in the campus' pro-Palestinian protests, and has accused, without supplying evidence, of 'activities aligned to Hamas.' When TIME visited the Jena facility on May 29, nine landscapers in lime green shirts sat in the intake room on long benches, waiting their turn to be formally admitted. Their shirts read Twin Shores Landscape & Construction Services. Two days earlier, they had been starting a project on the Mirabeau Water Garden construction site in New Orleans, part of a $30 million federally funded drainage project to reduce flooding in the area. At 7 a.m., ICE officers surrounded the site, blocking the exits to the park, as a government helicopter hovered overhead. Donald Tercero, 36, was among those arrested. Tercero, who is Nicaraguan, had worked on farms and as a teacher before arriving in the U.S. in 2022. He presented himself to the Border Patrol at McAllen, Texas, seeking humanitarian parole under a program the Biden Administration had started that year. He's not planning to fight his deportation. 'I want to go back,' Tercero says. Manuel Carillo, a 29-year-old from Guatemala, was also among the construction crew arrested in the New Orleans ICE raid. 'Not everyone wants to do the work we are doing,' he says. 'Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn't want us to stay.' Jimmy Bingham, the warden at Jena, says fewer detained migrants are resisting deportation these days. 'They don't feel like it's worth their time to fight,' Bingham says. Upon admission, inmates are given colored uniforms—red and yellow garb for the most serious felonies, green and orange for lesser offenses, blue for those with no conviction. They are separated according to these classifications and housed in dorms that hold 80 people apiece, with showers, phones, televisions, and a gaming system. They get two hours for recreation in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon, says the prison administrator. When TIME enters one of the dorms, a group of inmates rushes over, asking to tell their stories. Some had been there a few days, others a few weeks, and some even a few months as they waited to have their cases heard. The lucky ones are granted bond and can return home until a judge is ready to determine their fate. Read More: Trump's 2024 Person of the Year Interview Transcript. Jena is one of around 200 ICE detention facilities across the U.S., but agency officials like to send prisoners there for a few reasons. It's cheaper to detain migrants in Louisiana than in other parts of the country, and the state has a conservative federal Circuit Court that's more likely than some others to rule in the government's favor when it seeks a removal. Jena is also located near the Alexandria Staging Facility, a small airport managed by GEO. On average, the Alexandria facility flies six planes a day to other countries, says Ragan Lewis, an ICE officer who runs the airport. Some days see as many as 12 outgoing flights. As a plane loaded up with prisoners, Lewis waved his hand toward a stretch of grass next to the airfield. If there were money to expand the holding cells, he says, he could fit 2,000 people there. Lewis hopes the broad legislative package moving through Congress will allocate funding to expand the Jena facility to house more migrants, who could then be flown out of the country on planes from Alexandria. Just after dawn on May 29, the swish of chains dragging on asphalt was loud enough to be heard over idling engines. Roughly 70 men shuffled across the tarmac toward a chartered jet that would take them to Nicaragua. Before boarding, guards patted each down, looking for hidden weapons, unlocking and relocking their restraints, and directing them to make the awkward ascent up the stairs to the plane. One of the men, wearing a black hoodie, shook the chains around his wrists at a guard and said, 'Como perros! Como perros!' (Like dogs.) Once the detainees were on board, agents brought in a van with dozens of women, also manacled, to board next. Then came the only migrants without chains: family units. A woman with her teenage son got on first, followed by a woman with her young daughter. By the time the flight lifted off, there were 118 passengers on board. Whether Cristian will end up on one of these planes isn't yet clear. In May he was let out of Jena on a $4,000 bond. He is due back in immigration court in New Orleans on Sept. 2 to find out whether he will be sent back to Honduras or can remain in the U.S. with his father. The deportation chain in Louisiana exemplifies a nationwide operation that is redefining American immigration policy, legally and morally. The fallout is reaching far beyond those who entered the country without permission. Law-enforcement officials have snatched foreign students off the street for engaging in speech the Administration doesn't like. Trump has revoked student visas and put foreign students into deportation proceedings without warning. 'A visa is a gift,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 28. 'No one is entitled to a visa.' Trump is targeting younger children too. His attorneys have argued in federal court that he should be allowed to ignore the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship for those born in the U.S. and terminate the rights of children born to parents who were in the country illegally. The President has cut federal funding to social-service nonprofits that offer legal representation to people facing deportation to ensure their cases are fairly decided. 'The very idea of deporting a child without a lawyer should be unthinkable in America,' says Jojo Annobil, the CEO of the Immigrant Justice Corps. Perhaps no other issue has crystallized criticism of Trump's immigration agenda like the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador. Like many of Trump's policies, it came about through a series of conversations, rather than a conventional legal process. On the campaign stump, Trump occasionally castigated Bukele, the Salvadoran President, for sending MS-13 gang members to the U.S. Trump ally and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of Bukele's biggest American fans, told Trump that this wasn't true. Bukele was the most popular leader in Latin America, he told Trump, and attacking him wasn't going to help win over the Hispanic voters Trump was courting. When Gaetz visited El Salvador for Bukele's second inauguration last summer, he and Bukele discussed the idea of the Salvadorans holding some of the migrants whom Trump planned to deport if he won. When Gaetz returned, he tells TIME, he brought the idea to Trump and his team. Shortly after taking office, Trump directed Rubio to cut a deal with Bukele, two senior White House officials say. Rubio came back with an offer in hand, according to U.S. officials: $20,000 per prisoner for a year. There were wrinkles in the deal. Bukele wanted the Trump Administration to send a handful of Salvadoran MS-13 members held in U.S. prisons, including some who the Treasury Department alleged in December 2021 had engaged in secret negotiations with officials of Bukele's government. At the same time, the deportations would require claims of extraordinary presidential powers. Miller and the White House Counsel's office planned to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that grants the President wartime authority during an invasion or 'predatory incursion.' The plan was so closely held that only a few senior members of the Administration knew it was happening, one of them tells TIME. On March 15, the Trump Administration sent 238 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members or terrorists. Some had recently been arrested. Many of them had not been convicted in U.S. court. The Administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the fourth time in U.S. history, and the first since World War II. The declaration was made at 3:53 p.m. The flights for El Salvador were scheduled for 5:26, 5:44, and 7:36 p.m. Prompted by an emergency motion from the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, U.S. Judge James Boasberg ordered a virtual hearing on the matter for late that afternoon. Boasberg heard arguments, then ordered the government to halt the removals. 'Whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane, or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you,' Boasberg told the DOJ. 'But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.' Yet two planeloads of migrants had already left ahead of schedule. A third one was still on the tarmac at a Texas airfield, but took off anyway. The Trump Administration has not confirmed the names of the Venezuelans on those flights. Nor has it shown evidence that all of the men belonged to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. A review by the Cato Institute found that more than 50 of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had followed legal steps to enter the country. A CBS News investigation found that most of the Venezuelans had no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad. One of the men on the planes was Abrego Garcia, who the Justice Department would later admit had been mistakenly deported. Another was Franco Caraballo Tiapa, who worked as a barber in Venezuela. In 2023, Tiapa and his wife Johanny trekked across the Darién Gap, sleeping in the open and surviving on scraps of discarded food, until they presented themselves at the U.S. border and asked for asylum. The two lived together in Sherman, Texas, where they made money cutting hair. On Feb. 3, Tiapa visited an ICE office in Dallas for a regular check-in. This time he was arrested, according to Johanny. The Administration says his tattoos show he's a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. One is of his daughter's name. Others depict a lion; a rose; and a razor blade on the side of his neck—a symbol of his work as a barber, according to his wife. She says he has no criminal record in the U.S. or Venezuela. 'They were only looking at his tattoos,' Johanny says. Outside of CECOT's Module 7, Garcia, the warden, brings out a Styrofoam container with a hamburger, French fries, ketchup packs, and Milano cookies. This is a typical meal for the Venezuelan inmates, he says. Their diet was devised by Bukele, who instructed they be fed fast food to gain weight, as a way of trolling critics who argue CECOT's conditions are inhumane, according to Salvadoran sources. 'It's a cat-and-mouse game,' says one person close to Bukele. The maneuver is similar to the photo op Bukele staged when Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia. The pair were photographed sitting poolside with what Van Hollen said were 'fake' margaritas. (Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in early June.) After the tour of the prison, Garcia allows TIME to interview one inmate in a holding area near the unit's entrance. The man says his name is Hector Hernandez. He appears to be the nightmare that Trump has conjured time and again on the campaign trail. He says he is an MS-13 member, and has tattoos all over his body, from his face and neck to his forearms. The prisoner claims that before he was deported in 2019 and apprehended by Salvadoran authorities, he murdered 50 people in Northern Virginia—more than three times the number of reported murders in Prince William or Fairfax counties for that year. TIME was unable to verify the details provided by the prisoner, including his name, his alleged crimes, or how he came to be there. Inside CECOT, the extreme terminus for Trump's deportation program, the truth, like everything else, is under the control of the authorities. What is clear, however, are the draconian conditions to which the Salvadoran inmates at CECOT are subjected. They are under constant surveillance. The lights never go off. They share cells with rival gang members. Prisoners who get out of line face up to 14 days in pitch-black solitary confinement, says Garcia. For the past 2½ years, the man who identifies himself as Hector Hernandez says, he's had no communication with the outside world. He hasn't spoken to family. He hasn't seen or read a news report. He doesn't know who the President of the United States is. —With reporting by Harry Booth, Leslie Dickstein, and Tharin Pillay Contact us at letters@
Yahoo
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Line painters involved in two-vehicle accident in White Deer Township
WHITE DEER TOWNSHIP — Two vehicles involved in line painting on Route 15 in White Deer Township collided on May 29, according to state police in Milton. State Trooper Aaron Messiner, of the Milton State Police Barracks, reported the crash occurred at 11:40 a.m. May 29 on the Westbranch Highway in White Deer Township, 454 feet north of the Old Route 15 exit. No injuries were reported. Peter C. Andrews, 34, of Taylor, was driving a 2012 Isuzu while J. Cagers Martinez, 25, of Oswego, N.Y., was following in a 2010 Ford F650 Super Crew. They were both completing line painting on the left side of the highway, police said. Martinez began slowing down to start painting when Andrews failed to stop and struck the other vehicle, police said. The Isuzu had disabling damage, and the Super Crew had minor damage, police said. Andrews was not wearing a seat belt, but Martinez was, police said. Andrews was cited for careless driving, police said. Assisting on the scene were William Cameron Engine Company and Bailey's Auto and Towing of Allenwood, police said. — JUSTIN STRAWSER
