Family of Rachel Morin faces grief as suspect in killing faces judge (2024)

All that denial was stripped away on June 14, she said, when she got a call from Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler. He told her detectives had determined how her daughter had been killed in August and that she had been raped, Morin recalled. The investigators also revealed they had found a suspect and were about to take him into custody in Oklahoma.

“It just made everything more real, more factual,” Morin said. “You feel the full blunt of your grief.”

One week after that call, the man wanted in Rachel Morin’s killing appeared in court Friday, when a judge in Harford County District Court ordered him to remain in jail without bond until his trial.

Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 23, was arrested after officials recently linked him through DNA from a Los Angeles home burglary to the killing, according to Gahler.

Prosecutors in court said Rachel Morin had been strangled and beaten.

“This murder was among the most brutal and violent offenses that have occurred in Harford County history,” Harford County State’s Attorney Alison Healey said before the judge ruled.

Amy Valdivia, a public defender representing Martinez-Hernandez, said during the court hearing that he “stands before the court presumed innocent.” She did not comment further before the hearing.

Martinez-Hernandez, from El Salvador, had crossed into the United States unlawfully in February 2023, officials said, and had fled to the United States after the killing of a young woman in his home country. Prosecutors said Friday the woman in El Salvador was killed after she left a bar with him, and he is charged in her death.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Martinez-Hernandez had unlawfully entered the United States and was sent back across the U.S.-Mexico border on three occasions in January and February of 2023. He was known to have spent time in Maryland, Virginia, Los Angeles and finally Tulsa, where he was apprehended earlier this month, police said.

Morin’s killing in August drew wide attention. The mother of five had gone for a run on the Ma and Pa Heritage Trail about 20 miles northeast of Baltimore but did not return. Her car was found parked at the entrance, and her boyfriend reported her missing that night. Martinez-Hernandez’s family had provided detectives with two bags of clothing and shoes he had left behind that were used to match with DNA recovered at the crime scene, according to charging documents.

Patty Morin found out about her daughter’s death as she was driving home from Kentucky, where she’d gone to mourn the loss of a granddaughter — just 3 months old — who died of sudden infant death syndrome. Morin and one of her other daughters were driving home, having been on the road for only about 30 minutes.

Patty Morin said she expects to be at most, if not all, of Martinez-Hernandez’s court hearings in Harford County. Doing so, she said, is a way to help ensure that justice is served.

“A mother wants to protect her children, and I wasn’t there to protect her last year,” Morin said. “Maybe this is some way to still do that, to make sure nothing is left undone.”

Patty Morin holds bright memories of her daughter Rachel: The petite, redheaded girl; the happy and vivacious young woman; the devoted mother of five whose lives she could manage while owning and operating a residential and commercial cleaning business. “She tailored work around her children,” Morin said. “Rachel was a very scheduled person. … She loved life.”

Early on, because investigators kept their findings to themselves, Patty Morin said that she and others didn’t have a sense of how hard they were working and how many people were doing so. Then, about four months into the case, there was a large gathering of family, volunteers and law enforcement to canvass areas in Bel Air to gather possible leads and see if anyone remembered seeing anything.

Afterward, Morin entered a room at the sheriff’s office with 30 to 40 other people, all of whom were playing a role in the case.

“I saw that this case was just as important to them as it was to me,” she said. “As this went on, I knew them to be fathers and mothers and husbands and wives, too. Rachel wasn’t just a folder on someone’s desk.”

Early in the case, Harford investigators linked Morin’s killing to DNA collected from a home burglarized earlier in Los Angeles, where law enforcement officials allege Martinez-Hernandez assaulted a 9-year-old girl and her mother.

The recent allegations against Martinez-Hernandez, and his purported status as an undocumented immigrant who had fled El Salvador after allegedly killing someone there, generated intense interest by news media and the public.

Officials and politicians have spoken about Martinez-Hernandez’s immigration status. At a news conference, Gahler said that Martinez-Hernandez “did not come here to make a better life for himself or for his family. He came here to escape the crime he committed in El Salvador. He came here and murdered Rachel. And God willing, no one else. But that should have never been allowed to happen.”

The sheriff also said: “I want to now direct these comments to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to every member in both chambers of Congress. We are 1,800 miles away 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.”

Presidential candidate Donald Trump posted about the case on Truth Social, laying blame for Rachel’s death at President Biden’s border policies. Trump called Morin’s family to express his condolences, the family’s attorneys said Thursday.

There is little evidence that immigrants — or even undocumented immigrants — cause more crime, according to a Washington Post Fact Checker analysis on Feb. 29. Still, there is enough ambiguity in the data — or so little hard data — that it’s difficult to point to conclusive findings that would change opinions.

“Many politicians, law enforcement personnel and ordinary citizens are nonetheless incensed because this person should not have been in the country and thus capable of committing a crime,” said Michael Light, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied the issue. “This view that the person’s undocumented status is an aggravating factor is also likely a reason why these crimes generate such strong responses.”

Morin said she is aware of peoples’ strongly held views around immigration politics and policies and how they’ve opined on the case, but she didn’t want to discuss that element.

“I have very strong political views,” she said. “But I don’t want the focus to be on the political. … I want the focus to be on Rachel and her story.”