By John Dobberstein, Editor
Tulsa police have arrested a native of El Salvador wanted for a crime spree last year that spread from his own country into at least two U.S. states.
Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, 23, was arrested late Friday night sitting in a bar in East Tulsa and is being prepared for extradition proceedings.
Authorities said Hernandez is wanted in El Salvador for murder there. After that incident, he popped up in Los Angeles where he violently assaulted a 9-year-old girl and her mother during a home invasion, the Tulsa Police Department said Saturday.
Hernandez then appeared in Harford County, Md., near Baltimore, where authorities said he killed Rachel Morin, a mother of 5, while she was walking down a trail.
Authorities believe Hernandez was hiding adjacent to a trail where Morin was walking and attacked and killed her before fleeing the state.
The FBI contacted detectives with the Tulsa Police Department Special Investigations Division, as they had been working on information that the suspect was in the Tulsa area.
The FBI and TPD detectives, and patrol officers converged on a bar located at 21st Street and Garnett Road and found Hernandez “casually sitting at the bar” and placed him under arrest. Initially the suspect lied about his true identity and denied any knowledge of the crimes he is wanted for, police said.
The suspect was booked into the Tulsa County Jail and is awaiting extradition for his various crimes.
Tulsa police said the arrest was a culmination of “tremendous efforts from multiple agencies across the U.S. We are proud of our Tulsa police officers for putting an end to Hernandez’s violent attacks on innocent people.”
In a press conference announcing the arrest on Saturday, reported on by Fox News in Baltimore, Harford County Sheriff Jeffery Gahler said that Martinez-Hernandez is charged with first-degree murder and first-degree rape.
He said that Martinez-Hernandez crossed the border into the U.S. in February of 2023, and that he believes that Morin was not his first victim.
“It is my understanding that this suspect, this monster, fled to the United States after the murder of a young woman in El Salvador a month earlier in January of 2023,” Sheriff Gahler said. “Once in our country, he brutally attacked a nine-year-old girl and her mother in a home invasion in March of 2023 in Los Angeles.”
Fox News reported the Los Angeles case was the through line which allowed investigators to connect DNA samples from the murder scene in Harford County to the surveillance video of the suspect in California. This gave local and federal investigators their first images of Martinez-Hernandez, authorities said.
“After we had the video, we knew what he looked like, but we didn’t know who he was,” Gahler said.
FBI Baltimore Special Agent William DelBagno explained that they were able to trace his DNA to potential family members in El Salvador to help identify the suspect, Fox News reported.
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