Former President Trump on Friday met with the family of Rachel Morin, the Maryland mother of five who was brutally attacked and murdered, allegedly by an illegal immigrant suspect from El Salvador in August 2023.
Trump’s visit to the southern border and meeting with the Morin family came during his campaign stop in Cochise County, Arizona.
“The reason I came here today and I accepted the invitation is because I really want our words to be heard, and I really want you to take to heart what we’re saying,” Patty Morin said. “We’re not here for a political stand, although we are. We’re here because we’re losing our moms, our daughters, our children, to criminals, and that shouldn’t happen. We should be taking care of our country, our people, and the only way I think that’s going to happen is if President Trump is reelected as president.”
Patty went on to share the story of how she came to learn that her daughter had been murdered.
“Rachel was 37 years old. She had five children. She worked. She owned a small business. She worked very hard to support her family, and the trail that Rachel ran daily was a trail that we as a family would walk over the last 25 that we’ve lived in Maryland,” she began, referring to the Ma & Pa Trail in Bel-Air, Maryland, that Rachel ran on regularly, as she was on the evening she was killed.
“It’s a very safe, small trail. Very public, very open. Moms with baby carriages go down the trial. It’s very safe,” Patty said.
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She was in Kentucky at the time of Rachel’s death, visiting family because her grandchild had just passed away, when she got a call from a Maryland detective saying they found Rachel’s body.
“They found my daughter’s body, and when they found it…it just recently came out that she was brutally beaten, raped and then stuffed into a drain pipe,” Patty recalled.
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“We are 1,008 miles from the border, and because of this open border, we’ve had not just my daughter, but we’ve had two in the same county … where illegal immigrants have come in and have caused rape and murder of our citizens,” she said.
In June of this year, Harford County Sheriff Jeffery Gahler announced the arrest of Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from El Salvador, in Morin’s murder.
Martinez-Hernandez was apprehended in Tusla, Oklahoma, and faces charges of first-degree murder, rape and kidnapping, in connection with Morin’s death.
Authorities have labeled him a potential serial killer after his alleged involvement in a slew of crimes against women in Central America and the United States, and prosecutors are seeking a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the suspect.
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Investigators also tied DNA found at the scene of Morin’s murder to DNA found inside a Los Angeles residence after a home invasion in March of last year.
“Once in our country, and likely emboldened by his anonymity, he attacked a 9-year-old girl and her mother during a home invasion in March of 2023 in Los Angeles,” Gahler said at the time of the suspect’s arrest. “And as everyone I believe is aware, that was our first DNA match linking Rachel’s case to the one in Los Angeles.”
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Despite the DNA match linking the two cases, however, authorities were unable to find an identity match for the DNA samples collected from either crime scene because it was not previously logged in the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) system, where authorities log DNA samples of offenders arrested in the United States.
“We are 1800 miles from the southern border,” Gahler said in June. “And American citizens are not safe because of their failed immigration policies.”
Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
