The man accused of killing Rachel Morin on a Bel Air walking trail in August is wanted on an international warrant for a homicide in his native El Salvador, Harford County’s top prosecutor said in court Friday.
When State’s Attorney Alison Healey began to describe how Victor Martinez-Hernandez allegedly attacked a woman outside a bar in El Salvador in approximately December 2022, his public defender stood up and lodged an objection, calling the information irrelevant to his prosecution in Maryland and accusing Healey of putting on “a show.”
District Judge Kerwin A. Miller stopped Healey from going into further detail, determining he had heard enough to decide that he wasn’t letting Martinez-Hernandez out of jail before his trial.
Saying the case featured a “heinous set of facts,” Miller found that Martinez-Hernandez presented a danger to the public and a flight risk, ordering him held without bond.
A 37-year-old mother of five, Morin went missing after going for a walk on Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in Bel Air in the evening of Aug. 5, 2023. Police found her exposed body the next day in a wooded area adjacent to the trail. Morin had been beaten to death and sexually assaulted, detectives wrote in charging documents for Martinez-Hernandez.
Morin’s assailant attacked her on the trail and dragged her through the woods to the drainage ditch where her body was discovered, Healey said in court. During her autopsy, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner documented up to 15 head wounds, determining that she died by strangulation and blunt-force injuries.
“This murder was among the most brutal and violent offenses that have occurred in Harford County history,” Healey said.
Martinez-Hernandez, 23, is charged with first- and second-degree murder, first- and second-degree rape and first- and second-degree assault. He appeared in court by video from the Harford County Detention Center. A Spanish interpreter translated the dialogue in court.
“Mr. Martinez Hernandez stands before this court presumed innocent,” said his attorney, public defender Amy Valdivia.
She added that her client has a 3-year-old daughter and provides for his parents.
Given the nature of his charges, however, Valdivia conceded “this is a largely academic hearing and Mr. Martinez-Hernandez understands that.”
Morin’s relatives filed into the courtroom Friday, with some becoming emotional when Martinez-Hernandez appeared on the television screen.
“I certainly think it’s tough the first time — I certainly thought it was tough — to look into the eyes, even though it was on video, to look in the face of the man who was alleged to have taken your daughter, your sister’s life,” the family’s attorney, Randolph Rice, told reporters after court. “So it had to be tough to see him sitting there in that black jumpsuit, with his hands cuffed.”
Morin’s death attracted international attention last summer, but detectives would have to wait until May for a tip that gave their investigation momentum. The information provided to investigators, along with a DNA analysis known as genetic genealogy, allowed police to home in on Martinez-Hernandez.
After allegedly killing Morin, Martinez-Hernandez remained in Maryland for the better part of a year, according to charging documents. DNA analysis led police to his relatives, who revealed in a June interview with detectives that Martinez-Hernandez stayed with them from December until the beginning of May, when he left and “never returned.”
Operating on FBI intelligence suggesting that he was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police and federal agents arrested Martinez-Hernandez at a bar there late June 14. He waived his rights to fight extradition, enabling authorities to fly him to Maryland. He arrived at Martin State Airport in Middle River onThursday to a crowd of news cameras and law enforcement officers.
Police said in charging documents that Martinez-Hernandez’s relatives gave detectives two bags of clothing and a pair of shoes that belonged to him. Investigators swabbed several items for DNA and sent the genetic material for analysis at the Maryland State Police forensics lab, which found that the DNA taken from his clothes matched that collected from Morin’s body.
Matthew McMahon, the father of Morin’s oldest daughter, expressed his “deepest gratitude” to law enforcement after court.
There was one other clue in the belongings relatives provided to investigators, police in Oklahoma wrote in an application for a warrant to search his residence there: Harford County detectives “located a sketch that resembled the victim’s face from the chest up.”
Officers with the Tulsa Police Department searched a one-story, brownstone house on the city’s outskirts, where Martinez-Hernandez had been renting a room, he told police, according to a search warrant return. They turned up a laptop computer, a sketch pad, bus tickets and an identification from El Salvador.
Martinez-Hernandez entered the country unlawfully three times, crossing the border in Texas and New Mexico, over less than a month in January and February 2023, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Border Patrol agents apprehended him each time and promptly “expelled” him to Mexico.
ICE officials said Martinez-Hernandez snuck into the country again “on or about” Feb. 13, 2023.
Miller said in court that ICE placed a detainer on Martinez-Hernandez, meaning they are requesting local law enforcement hold him for up to 48 hours after he would otherwise be released.
Authorities believe Martinez-Hernandez killed the woman in El Salvador before leaving for America and suspect him in a crime about a month after he crossed the southern border, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler previously told reporters. He also said DNA from the scene of Morin’s killing matched genetic matter collected from a March 2023 home invasion in Los Angeles during which a mother and her 9-year-old daughter were attacked.
Authorities in El Salvador and Los Angeles have not answered questions about those cases.
When he announced Martinez-Hernandez’s arrest, Gahler, a Republican, described the American immigration system as broken and demanded action from the federal government. In doing so, he thrust the case into a contentious political debate expected to play a prominent part in the forthcoming presidential election.
Former Republican President Donald Trump, his party’s presumptive nominee for president this year, called Morin’s mother Thursday morning to express his condolences to the family.
