The mother of a Maryland woman murdered during a jog in 2023 addressed the nation from the White House on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, two days after a jury convicted the man responsible.
Patty Morin, mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, used the national platform to share a painful account of the violence her daughter endured. She also condemned the U.S. immigration system, saying it allowed the man who killed Rachel to stay in the country illegally.
Rachel went for a jog on the Ma & Pa Trail in Harford County on August 5, 2023. The next day, investigators found her body in a drainage culvert roughly 150 feet off the trail.
Patty recounted what authorities and autopsy reports had revealed. She said Rachel had planned to go grocery shopping with her children after the jog, but never made it home. “He waited for her to come closer,” Patty said of the suspect Victor Martinez-Hernandez. “He saw that there was nobody around. He attacked her.”
She described how the attacker beat Rachel with rocks, causing at least 20 head wounds. Patty said the injuries shattered her daughter’s skull, destroyed part of her brain, and left her face and body severely damaged. “There wasn’t one inch of her body that didn’t have some kind of injury,” she said.
Patty’s statement came after a jury convicted Victor on April 14 of first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree rape, a third-degree sex offense, and kidnapping in the death of her daughter, Rachel.
Investigators said he entered the United States illegally from El Salvador in 2023 and had known ties to gangs. Border Patrol agents apprehended him three times that year — once in Texas and twice in New Mexico — but released him each time.
Later, DNA evidence linked Victor to a violent assault involving a mother and child in Los Angeles. Authorities said he then traveled to Maryland, where he attacked and killed Rachel while she was out for a jog. Law enforcement located him nearly 10 months later at a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and took him into custody.
His trial began in Maryland on April 4. After less than an hour of deliberation, jurors returned a guilty verdict. Harford County State’s Attorney Alison Healey said the state would seek the maximum penalty: life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In the aftermath of the conviction, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler criticized the U.S. immigration system, calling it a “failure” that allowed Victor to remain in the country and commit multiple crimes. He also condemned Maryland’s repeal of the death penalty in 2013, saying the case deserved the strongest sentence available.
