An unauthorized immigrant from El Salvador was sentenced to life without parole on Monday for the brutal 2023 killing of a Maryland woman while she was on a hiking trail. It was a coda to a case that Republicans have seized on to justify harsher immigration policies.
The man, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 24, was found guilty this year in the rape and murder of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five. Ms. Morin was exercising on a popular trail in Bel Air, Md., in August 2023 when, according to prosecutors, Mr. Martinez-Hernandez pulled her off the trail, raped her, bashed her head with rocks and strangled her. Her body was found the next day, hidden in drainage culverts, prosecutors said.
Mr. Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in June 2024 in Tulsa, Okla., and convicted in April of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, third-degree sex offense and kidnapping, according to court records. The authorities said he had also been linked to a 2023 home invasion in Los Angeles, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Martinez-Hernandez is also wanted in El Salvador in connection with the murder of another woman, according to prosecutors.
Judge Yolanda L. Curtin of the Third Judicial Circuit in Harford County, Md., sentenced Mr. Martinez-Hernandez to life without the possibility of parole, and an additional life sentence to be run consecutively, according to the state’s attorney’s office for Harford County. Mr. Martinez-Hernandez was also ordered to serve an additional 40 years, prosecutors said.
Alison Healey, the state’s attorney for Harford County, said in a statement that she hoped the sentence would provide closure for Ms. Morin’s family.
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