Mosque arson trial for Victoria man begins
Prosecutor: Suspect showed ‘absolute hatred of Muslims’
VICTORIA — Marq Vincent Perez, on trial for burning down the Victoria mosque last year, was consumed with hatred for Muslims and had been plotting violence against them, a federal jury was told Monday.
“‘I’ll burn every (expletive) with a raggedy towel on their head.’ Those are the words of the defendant just a few weeks before he burned the Victoria Islamic Center to the ground,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharad Khandelwal said in his opening statement.
According to Khandelwal, Perez had become convinced that the gold-domed mosque on Airline Road represented a real threat to the city and had formed a “rogue unit” to stop them.
“The defendant’s absolute hatred of Muslims had led him to believe that Muslims were planning a takeover of the city of Victoria, and that they were using the mosque to store weapons,” he said.
Perez, 26, is charged with three felonies: burning down the mosque, committing a hate crime by doing so and possessing an unregistered destructive device.
If convicted, he faces up to 40 years in prison.
The trial got underway late Monday afternoon after an unusually laborious jury selection process in which 35 of the pool of 65 jurors said they might have a problem with serving on the jury.
U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey then spent about two hours speaking privately to each of them before the panel of eight women and six men, which includes two alternates, was selected.
The judge had earlier warned against possible religious bias in a long list of questions raised with the panel, saying, “This case is not a referendum on Islam or Christianity or any other religion.”
The dramatic destruction of the gilt-domed mosque on Jan. 28, 2017, came at a politically charged time.
A day earlier, President Donald Trump had announced the first of several attempts to bar travel to the United States for people from several majority-Muslim countries, among other nations.
Perez, an electrician’s helper, was arrested about a month after the fire in connection with an unrelated violent event. Authorities soon linked him to the mosque fire, and he has been held without bond since.
His lawyer, Mark DiCarlo of Corpus Christi, has attacked the government’s use of a juvenile informant.
Authorities say the juvenile — who says he helped Perez burglarize the mosque on Jan. 22, 2017, and again on Jan. 28, 2017, when it was set ablaze — is cooperating with police.
According to DiCarlo’s court pleadings, Perez was at home or at DeTar Hospital for the birth of his son at the time of the fire.
DiCarlo did not deliver opening remarks Monday, choosing to reserve them for later in the trial.
In his opening, Khandelwal painting a seemingly damning case against Perez.
He told the jurors that items stolen from the mosque were recovered from Perez’s home; that Perez had planned the mosque attack on social media pages since recovered by police; and that he took photos of the inferno on his cellphone, also recovered by police.