SAN ANTONIO – For 12 times in 2018, Juan David Ortiz, U.S. Border Patrol supervisory agent, picked up girls on Laredo’s streets, drove them to distant corners of the county and ended their lives with near-variety gunshots to the head.
On Wednesday, a jury unanimously identified Ortiz responsible of capital murder, ending for now one particular of the additional chilling murder sagas in South Texas record.
It also concluded a demo that was punctuated with courtroom drama, together with a health care provider who rushed from the witness stand to handle a fainting juror and a revealing jailhouse cell phone simply call that further incriminated the defendant.
Ortiz, 39, stood stone-confronted as the Webb County Choose Oscar Hale examine the verdict, just after jury deliberations stretched earlier 7 p.m. Nearby, additional than 20 spouse and children customers of the victims cried or gasped loudly. Ortiz’s mother, seated in the row powering his protection group, collapsed into the arms of a relative, sobbing loudly.
The jury of eight women and 4 males took 5 several hours to get to their verdict. Ortiz was automatically sentenced to daily life in jail devoid of parole. He could enchantment the final decision.
The verdict shut a four-yr ordeal in Laredo that incorporated more than a dozen pre-trial hearings and motions, a pandemic that slowed the legal method and an psychological demo that contrasted Ortiz’s own videotaped confession with the sobs of victims’ households.
Soon after the verdict, one by one, family members of the victims read emotional statements as Ortiz stood a couple of feet absent, dealing with just about every man or woman.
“Do you know how significantly suffering you have prompted this spouse and children?” stated Gracie Perez, sister-in-law of Melissa Ramirez, a single of the victims. “I loathe you for what you did and I could in no way forgive you, nor do I think God will.”
She included: “Monsters like you don’t even have earned to breathe.”
From Sept. 3 to 15, 2018, prosecutors stated, Ortiz picked up the women – Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Luera, Guiselda Hernandez and Janelle Ortiz – along Laredo’s San Bernardo Avenue, a extend populated by intercourse workers and drug pushers. A person by a person, he drove them out to remote stretches of the county and shot them with his federal government-issued .40-caliber handgun, leaving their bodies slumped on filth roadways or beneath overpasses. All gals ended up identified to be intercourse employees who struggled with drug dependancy.
“Justice to me would be having my mother back, and I am going to under no circumstances get my mom again,” reported Ciara Munguia, 24, Luera’s daughter, battling again tears. “But possessing him guilty assists convey closure. I could rest greater at night. I could move on with my everyday living.”
In Texas:Border Patrol agent’s murder demo the most recent in string of incidents stirring distrust
Defense: Ortiz was coerced into confession
Ortiz, an Iraq war veteran with the U.S. Navy and a 10-calendar year veteran of Border Patrol, was arrested following he drew his gun on a would-be fifth sufferer, Erika Peña, who fled his pickup truck and alerted police. He had pleaded not responsible to the expenses.
During the trial, defense lawyers painted Ortiz as an Iraq war veteran struggling from post-traumatic stress problem – and using a cocktail of prescribed medication to treat nervousness and migraines – who was coerced into a lengthy job interview with law enforcement.
“Seem at the guy in entrance of you, the guy who was there at the time: Broken, PTSD, migraine problems, insomnia, nightmares,” lead defense legal professional Joel Perez advised jurors Wednesday for the duration of closing arguments. Investigators “induced him, they confronted him, they promised him all these things,” Perez claimed. “It was improper inducement.”
But District Attorney Isidro Alaniz depicted Perez as a killer agent, indicating in a closing statement: “It is terrifying to have the enemy in just the ranks of legislation enforcement.”
The 2018 killings had been aspect of a stretch of violence and murder at the arms of Border Patrol Laredo Sector agents that yr.
In April 2018, police arrested Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, 33, a Border Patrol agent in Laredo, and billed him with the murders of Grizelda Hernandez, 27, and her 1-calendar year-aged son, Dominic. Prosecutors are seeking the demise penalty and his demo is tentatively set for January.
A month afterwards, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed Guatemalan migrant Claudia Patricia Gómez González, 20, immediately after she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and hid in a vacant great deal with other migrants in the nearby enclave of Rio Bravo. The ACLU of Texas in 2020 submitted a lawsuit in opposition to the agent on behalf of Gómez beneath the Federal Tort Promises Act for wrongful loss of life, amongst other prices. The lawsuit was paused afterwards that calendar year when the FBI commenced investigating the incident.
U.S. Customs and Border Safety, which oversees Border Patrol, has declined to comment on the Ortiz situation, indicating the agency does not remark on pending litigation. Prosecutors have said Ortiz utilised his own truck to have out the murders and was dressed in civilian apparel, though he used his company-issued handgun and hollow-stage governing administration bullets in the slayings.
Immigrant advocates for years have pushed for more transparency in how the agency disciplines its brokers for wrongdoing. They issue to a number of cross-border shootings by Border Patrol agents around the years as a troubling trend at the agency.
Since January 2010, more than 245 people have died as the result of an face with an agent with U.S. Customs and Border Defense, which features Border Patrol, according to a record compiled by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, an advocacy group.
Survivor’s chilling testimony
1 of the trial’s most extraordinary times arrived when Peña took the stand on the first working day and recounted the night time Ortiz drove her 1st to his residence in northeast Laredo. That night time, she felt a unexpected realization Ortiz had murdered her two close friends, Ramirez and Luera. She walked out of the home and vomited in the driveway.
Later, when Ortiz drove her to a close by benefit retail store, Peña mentioned he grew irritable when she inquired about her slain pals. He drew a gun on her with his still left hand and tried using to restrain her with his proper. Peña wriggled out of her shirt and fled to a Texas Department of General public Safety state trooper pumping gas at the station. She was equipped to detect Ortiz and point out his home to investigators, who arrested him later that night.
“Some way, somehow, I took off functioning without the need of a shirt,” Peña from the stand, as she recounted how Ortiz pointed a gun at her confront. “I am crying hysterically.”
Spectacular times at trial
The demo took eight days. The location experienced been moved from Laredo, the scene of the crimes, to the Bexar County courtroom procedure in San Antonio soon after defense attorneys argued the demo experienced obtained much too a lot publicity in Laredo. Testimony was streamed are living every single working day by Court docket TV and drew the fascination of national media outlets.
People of the victims – dressed in shirts emblazoned with the smiling faces of the four slain women of all ages – also attended, at occasions sobbing through crime scene pics or witness testimony of the killings.
On one day, as Webb County Health-related Examiner Corinne Stern testified and defined autopsy shots of the victims, a person juror fainted, halting the proceedings. Stern, a licensed health care medical professional, remaining the witness stand to give him assist. The juror regained consciousness and was afterwards dismissed from the trial.
Prosecutors also performed all 9½ hours of a videotaped interview carried out by investigators on Ortiz just after his arrest, in which he explained how he picked up and shot the women in remote locations. In the video, Ortiz instructed him how he returned to San Bernardo Avenue – Laredo’s red-mild district in which the ladies lived and worked – repeatedly, wanting for one more sufferer.
“I continued driving on (San Bernardo),” he suggests in the video. “This is wherever the monster arrived out.”
On Tuesday, prosecutors also performed a jailhouse phone contact recording between Ortiz, currently being held at Webb County Jail at the time, and his spouse, Daniela Ortiz. In the phone, Ortiz’s wife attempts to console him as he complains that he is worried about the prolonged confession he gave investigators all through his interview.
“I’m quite anxious about the assertion that was designed,” Ortiz states in the audio recording.
As the recording unspooled, Ortiz dropped his head on the desk in entrance of him and quietly wept, dabbing at tears with a tissue. Before long following, the prosecution rested its circumstance. The defense group rested as nicely with out calling any witnesses.
Before this yr, prosecutors determined not to seek out the dying penalty, soon after relatives of the victims claimed they most well-liked Ortiz serve the rest of his existence in prison.
“Element of me thinks it really is even worse to devote the rest of your daily life in prison,” mentioned Joey Cantu, 41, Hernandez’s brother, who served 23 yrs in a Texas jail. “I can wake up every single day of my existence and know he’s in there. I know he is heading to go through in there. It is really tough.”
Adhere to Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.