Man sentenced to life for killing Maryland woman on hiking trail
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Aug 13, 2025
- 3 min read
By Alexandra E. Petri and Livia Albeck-Ripka
An immigrant from El Salvador living in the country illegally was sentenced to life without parole 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. Morin was exercising on a popular trail in Bel Air, Maryland, in August 2023 when, according to prosecutors, 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.
Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in June 2024 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and convicted in April of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, third-degree sex offense and kidnapping, according to court records. Authorities said he had also been linked to a 2023 home invasion in Los Angeles, The Associated Press reported.
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 3rd Judicial Circuit in Harford County, Maryland, sentenced 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. 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 Morin’s family.
“Harford County has never seen a case or a defendant more deserving of every single day of the maximum sentence this court imposed today,” Healey said. “This has been a long and grueling process for Rachel’s family, and it is our hope that this sentence provides some sense of justice as they close this chapter and move forward in their grief and toward healing.”
Randolph Rice, a lawyer for the Morin family, said the family was grateful to authorities for their work on this case.
“It is a bittersweet type of hearing today because while this guy, the defendant, receives justice, it doesn’t bring Rachel back,” Rice said.
Lawyers listed in court records for Martinez-Hernandez did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump invoked Morin’s killing when he called for increased border security and mass deportations of immigrants living in the United States without legal status. And the case has continued to fuel his often misleading claims about what he says are the dangers posed by migrants.
Studies show that migrants commit fewer crimes than people born in the United States, but Trump and his supporters have made claims about a wave of violent crime committed by immigrants. Such claims have not been supported by police or court data.
Still, Republicans have called attention to the case of Morin, including on the campaign trail last year, when members of her family spoke to crowds about the murder.
“Open borders are often portrayed as compassionate and virtuous, but there is nothing compassionate about allowing violent criminals into our country and robbing children of their mother,” Morin’s brother, Michael Morin, told a crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year.
In April, just hours after a federal judge threatened a contempt-of-court investigation over the Trump administration’s deportation flights, Morin’s mother, Patty Morin, spoke at a special White House briefing aimed at freezing the legal debate over the flights. Morin recounted in detail the attack on her daughter.
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