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BELL Air, Maryland (AP) – An escaped man in El Salvador was convicted Monday in the 2023 killing of a Maryland woman attacked on a popular hiking trail in northeast Baltimore.
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Prosecutors claimed that when he, 24-year-old Victor Martinez-Hernandez, caught Rachel Morin from the trail, hit her head against a nearby rock, raped her and covered her body in a drainage culvert. Their case depends on DNA evidence linking him to the crime.
Randolph Rice, an attorney representing Molin’s relatives, said the jury found Martinez-Hernandez guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree rape, among other crimes.
“The Molins provide incredible reassurance for justice today,” Rice said in a statement.
Martinez-Hernandez is accused of illegally entering the United States after allegedly killing another woman from his home country. Authorities also linked him to the 2023 Los Angeles family invasion.
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Morin was killed in August 2023. The violence launched a shock wave through Bel Air, a suburban community in northeastern Baltimore and became a political flashpoint in the 2024 presidential election, with Donald Trump calling for increased border security and mass deportation for illegal immigrants in the United States.
Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in Oklahoma last summer. Prosecutors said he had been living in Bell air when Morin died. They say that Moline walks or runs on the same route almost every day (usually at night).
Defense attorneys challenged the prosecutor’s assertion that the crime was a random attack and said the police just met the wrong person. They also asked jurors to keep an eye on unresolved issues, including motive issues, during the trial.
Prosecutors said the detectives collected DNA from several places inside Morin’s body and formed Martinez Hernandez as a suspect. After interviewing some relatives, the detective matched the DNA at the scene with the DNA of the socks that Martinez-Hernandez left when he fled Maryland.
Morin, 37, has left five children. Her 14-year-old daughter, the first witness to testify last week, described her direct tears after her mother disappeared.
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