Former U.S. Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz has been sentenced to life in prison for the serial murders of four prostitutes to «clean up the streets» of Laredo County, in southern Texas, as he confessed to authorities after his arrest.
Ortiz, 39, committed the murders over 12 days in 2018 while serving as a supervising officer, a position he used to pick up his victims off the street, drive them to remote areas of the county and finally execute them by shooting them in the head using his service weapon.
Ortiz was finally arrested when his fifth victim, Erika Peña, managed to escape and alert the police.
The court has dismissed Ortiz’s defense requests to introduce as a mitigating factor Ortiz’s possible mental instability as a result of his military background, reports ‘USA Today’.
The killings were part of an increase in police violence in Laredo in 2018 at the hands of Border Patrol agents, such as the case of Officer Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, accused of the murders of a woman and her son.
Also around the same time, another Border Patrol agent shot and killed a migrant woman in cold blood after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, in a case pending verdict.
