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Law enforcement officials say they believe Juan David Ortiz, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) supervisor who confessed to killing four women in Texas last month, “probably used his government-issued, semiautomatic weapon” to carry out the horrific murder spree that left at least 11 children without their mothers.
“Certainly, right now, circumstantially, everything matches up,” Webb County-Zapata County District Attorney Isidro Alaniz said, telling USA Today that the Texas Department of Public Safety’s crime lab is in the process of testing. “The scientific evidence will confirm what we believe to be true: that they came from the HK.” While Ortiz is currently being on $2.5 million bond, Border Patrol has questions to answer regarding having a serial killer in its ranks.
In a late September letter, 18 House Democrats, including Texas Congress members Joaquin Castro and Beto O’Rourke, called on CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to investigate whether any government resources, including databases, were used in the murders. “Investigators suspect,” the report continues, Ortiz “used his position as an intelligence supervisor ... to monitor the murder investigation as it circled in on him and stay ahead of detectives.”
Ortiz, a decade-long veteran of Border Patrol, was caught after his near-fifth victim, Erika Peña, was able to escape his truck and alert authorities. But by then, Guiselda Alicia Hernandez, Claudine Ann Luera, Janelle Ortiz, and Melissa Ramirez had been brutally murdered. Peña’s family later said they believe he targeted the victims—all four women of color, and one a transgender woman—because he thought “no one would care for them."
That’s the attitude from an agency that sees their lives as disposable, judging from the tens of millions of dollars the government has had to pay to settle wrongful deaths at the hands of border agents. Sadly, it’s an attitude that’s also pervasive in our culture, because just look at how little national attention the murders of Guiselda Alicia Hernandez, Claudine Ann Luera, Janelle Ortiz, and Melissa Ramirez have received. They deserve answers, they deserve justice, and they cannot be forgotten.