White House hosts emotional press briefing with Rachel Morin's mother as special guest
WASHINGTON (TNND) — The White House held an emotional press briefing Wednesday night, with Rachel Morin's mother as their special guest.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told the press about Sen. Chris Van Hollen being in El Salvador out of concern for the mistakenly deported Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen posted on X, saying he "won't stop fighting until he's home."
The Maryland senator was denied a meeting with Abrego Garcia, but met with the vice president of El Salvador.
Leavitt stated that Van Hollen was not showing concern for Rachel Morin, a Harford County mother of five, who was raped and killed in August 2023 by Victor Martinez-Hernandez.
Rachel Morin's mother, Patty, spoke on her murder, recounting Rachel's final moments as well as her body being found brutalized and stuffed in a tunnel drain along Bel Air's Ma and Pa trail.
Patty told the media that "a lot of you don't know the whole story of Rachel and about the crime that was committed against her."
Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in June 2024 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after authorities used his DNA to identify him as a suspect, and his cellphone pinged at a sports bar in the area.
After his arrest, DNA swabs of his cheeks matched DNA that was found on Morin's body.
Martinez-Hernandez, 24, now faces life in prison after being found guilty of first degree murder, first degree rape, third degree sexual offense and kidnapping of Morin.
While Morin's family speculated on what happened to her, all of the information was shared during the two-week trial that her family had to sit through. Patty shared some of the details about Rachel, as well as the trail she was found on.
"We've walked the trail for the last 25 years that we've lived in Maryland. It's a safe place for our family, it's where we go to get a little bit of New England." Patty said, "She was not planning on dying that day. She wasn't planning on walking to her death."
Patty said that Martinez-Hernandez waited for her to get closer to then attack her, with medical examiners saying that they could count at least 20 times she was hit on her head with rocks, and both sides of her face were bashed in from the blunt force.
"There was not one inch of her body that didn't have some type of injury," Patty said, "In the courtroom, he actually looked like he thought he was going to be set free. There was no remorse on his face. At all."
Morin's mom explained how these were the types of criminals that President Trump is working to remove from the United States.
"Why should we allow people like this, violent criminals that have no conscious at all, to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters?"
Martinez-Hernandez's immigration status threw the case into the national spotlight over the past year as Trump campaigned for his second presidency, including mentions at the Republican National Convention in July 2024.
