It took jurors less than an hour on Monday to return a guilty verdict in the 2023 murder of Maryland mother Rachel Morin.
Illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez was accused of raping and killing Morin while she was out for a jog in August 2023. The 24-year-old Salvadoran man was convicted on all four charges he faced, including first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and kidnapping.
The Murder
The mother of five was reported missing by her boyfriend after she didn’t return home from a morning run on August 5, 2023. Her body was discovered the next day in a drainage ditch near the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail northeast of Baltimore. The autopsy revealed Morin suffered 15 to 20 blows to the head and died from strangulation and blunt force trauma.
The killer fled his home country of El Salvador after allegedly murdering a woman there. He failed to cross the southwestern border twice before successfully entering the United States illegally in February 2023.
Maryland authorities matched DNA evidence from Morin’s crime scene with DNA recovered from an unsolved home invasion and assault in Los Angeles. That match helped investigators use cell phone data to track Martinez-Hernandez to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was arrested 10 months after the murder.
He is facing a sentence of life in prison without parole. While illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes are typically only subject to deportation after they complete their sentence, the Trump administration is exploring legal options that would allow the deportation or the transfer of inmates to El Salvador.
A Mother’s Plea
While the media has been breathlessly covering the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, another Salvadoran national who was illegally living in the U.S., Martinez-Hernandez’s conviction has received little attention.
In an extraordinary moment Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed new details about Abrego Garcia’s violent past before stepping aside to give the microphone to someone she said the press has ignored for too long: Rachel’s mother Patty Morin.
She emotionally revealed previously unknown details about her daughter’s final moments, which were chillingly graphic:
“…He saw her. He saw that there was nobody around. He attacked her. He dragged her 150 feet, blood gushing from her head. It left a 150-foot trail of her blood to the culvert where he took he picked her up, he threw her against the wall the tunnel, and he raped her.
But before he did that, he stopped on that trail and… hammered her head against those rocks… He drags her through the thorn bushes. She has all the scrapes and cuts on her body. There wasn’t one inch of her body that didn’t have some kind of injury…
Then he takes her into the tunnel, and he picks her up. He throws her against the wall — blood is gushing from her head… They showed us pictures of her body against the wall… the blood outlined her body, and you could see where the blood ran down around her as he was raping her.
And then he threw her down and raped her some more, and then he strangled her because he didn’t want her to be able to live to tell the story…”
She slammed U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) for traveling to El Salvador to check in on Abrego Garcia while remaining mum on her daughter’s death. “A senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge — or barely acknowledged — my daughter and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother [chose to] use my tax money to fly to El Salvador to bring back a person… who isn’t even an American citizen,” she said.
Morin’s remarks left the White House Briefing Room in stunned silence, and she ended with a powerful plea. “These are the kind of criminals President Trump wants to remove from our country. These are the kind of criminals that we need to remove from our country. We are American citizens,” she said. “Why should we allow people like this, violent criminals that have no conscience at all, to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters?”
She then challenged the media. “Tell the truth. Tell how violent it really is,” Morin added. “This is a crime… It’s more than just politics or votes or just anything. It’s about national security, protecting Americans, protecting our children.”
You can get all the day’s headlines by tuning into the AM Update with Megyn Kelly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch AM Update live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays at 8:45am ET.