Witness details escape from agent on trial
She says he pulled gun before she fled, talked of slain friend
Erika Peña was scared. Juan David Ortiz had picked her up at a Laredo bus stop and took her to score drugs and then to his home to have sex, she told the jury at his capital murder trial Monday.
Peña began to realize that the Border Patrol supervisor might have killed her friend Melissa Ramirez, 29, when Ortiz told her that he had been “the next to the last person” to have sex with Ramirez, she said.
Ortiz said he was worried that investigators would find his DNA, and “it made me think that he was the one who might have been murdering,” Peña told the jury.
Ortiz is accused of killing
four women — all sex workers who frequented a stretch of San Bernardo Avenue just north of downtown Laredo.
Each was shot in the head or neck and each had previous contact with Ortiz, authorities said.
Prosecutors began their case against him with testimony from his alleged fifth victim, Peña, 31, who said Ortiz held her at gunpoint before she fled his vehicle on the night of Sept. 14, 2018.
Peña, a single mom, told the jury she has a criminal record and has been arrested “several times.”
An addict, she started “having sex for money” so she could buy cocaine, crack and heroin. She is now “done with everything,” is taking Methadone and recently completed two years of probation, she said.
Peña said she had known Ortiz for about five or six months. He gave her money to buy narcotics, driving her to a drug house, she said, and they
would have sex at his home or in his pickup on the side of a road or at a park.
“He was nice, smart, funny, a normal guy,” Peña said.
But on Sept. 14, Ortiz “was not himself anymore,” Peña said, and as her suspicions grew as he talked about Ramirez, she became ill and went outside to throw up.
She said she convinced Ortiz she was just hungry, so he drove her to a gas station to get beer and cigarettes, then parked behind the store, pulled out his government-issued handgun and grabbed her blouse.
“He was trying to grab me by my left shoulder,” she said. “Somehow, some way, I took off running without a shirt.”
A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper happened to be gassing up his vehicle.
“I heard her yelling for help,” Trooper Francisco Javier Hernandez told the jury. “She was scared and fearing for her life.”
His body camera video shows Peña hyperventilating and stating in English and Spanish that Ortiz, whom she knew only as David, had pointed a gun at her after they discussed the deaths of two of her friends, Ramirez and Claudine Anne Luera.
Before Ortiz’s arrest hours later, two more people Peña knew would die.
Ramirez had been killed Sept. 3. Luera, 42, was killed Sept. 13. Police believe that after Peña fled Ortiz’s pickup, he killed two more victims: Guiselda Alicia Hernandez, 35, and Janelle Ortiz, 28, a transgender woman.
Juan David Ortiz was arrested around 2:30 a.m. Sept. 15. A Webb County sheriff’s SWAT team found him unarmed and
hiding on the third level of a motel parking garage.
Besides capital murder, Ortiz is charged with aggravated assault and unlawful restraint, stemming from his encounter with Peña. His trial was moved to San Antonio from Webb County because of extensive media coverage in Laredo.
He has been held in the Webb County Jail in lieu
of $2.5 million bail.
In an opening statement, defense attorney Joel Perez of San Antonio took a slight shot at Webb County District Attorney Isidro R. “Chilo” Alaniz’s lengthy remarks to jurors and reminded them that his words were not evidence.
Perez said investigative reports by the Webb County Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Rangers were missing or protocols were not followed.
He said Peña “spent $300 to $400 a day and prostituted herself, not for her children, but to maintain her (drug) habit.”
Border Patrol officials have described Ortiz as a “rogue individual.” He joined U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Laredo in 2009 after serving in the Navy. He was 35 when arrested and was a supervisory intelligence agent with a master’s degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.
Now 39, Ortiz faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted. His case is being heard in Bexar County Court at Law No. 5 by state District Judge Oscar J. Hale Jr., who presides over the 406th District Court in Webb County.