Video shows ex-agent dodging questions
Ex-border Patrol supervisor accused in killings spoke of PTSD
Suspected of killing sex workers in Laredo, U.S. Border Patrol supervisor Juan David Ortiz looked sleepy as authorities questioned him following his arrest in Laredo on Sept. 15, 2018.
He fidgeted and stretched. Jurors at Ortiz’s capital murder trial Wednesday watched the beginning of what prosecutors said was a 10-hour interview that would end with his confessing to the four execution-style killings.
But at first, he was evasive, the video showed.
“You already know,” Ortiz told Webb County Sheriff’s Capt. Federico Calderon and Texas Ranger E.J. Salinas when they asked if he knew why he was being questioned.
Ortiz also is charged with aggravated assault of a woman who testified Monday she managed to flee from his pickup after he held her at gunpoint in a parking lot at a Circle K convenience store.
Officers had scrambled to find him after the woman, Erika Peña, ran to a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper pumping gas at the store. They saw Ortiz at the
same store hours later, chased him to a parking garage and arrested him.
The final two killings occurred in the hours between Peña’s escape and the arrest.
The trial was moved here at the request of defense lawyers because of adverse publicity in Laredo. It is being held in Bexar County Court at Law No. 5.
Prosecutors said Ortiz had previous contact with his victims, all prostitutes — including Peña, who testified Ortiz was a regular customer who would pick her up, take her to buy drugs and then have sex with her.
Peña told authorities she realized that night that Ortiz might have killed one of her friends weeks earlier, Melissa Ramirez, 29, who was shot to death on Sept. 3, 2018.
Ortiz also is charged with killing Claudine Anne Luera, 42, on Sept. 13, 2018, and Guiselda Alicia Hernandez, 35, and Janelle Ortiz, 28, both early on Sept. 15, 2018 shortly before his arrest.
They worked a stretch of San Bernardo Avenue just north of downtown Laredo and each was shot in the head or neck, authorities said.
Problems with the audio and the lack of an interpreter kept jurors waiting until Isidro R. “Chilo” Alaniz, the district attorney for Webb and Zapata counties, agreed with defense lawyers Joel Perez and Raymond Fuchs of San Antonio that Calderon could translate from the witness stand.
The interview with investigators was conducted in both English and Spanish, with phrases intermixed. Ortiz cursed through the conversation and spoke about being a veteran who had been deployed to Iraq. He was a Border Patrol supervisor and was about to be promoted until “going to the VA (expletive) up my life,” he told the officers.
They asked Ortiz if he had any medical issues, and he told them he had post traumatic stress disorder from his time in the Navy and his deployment. He said he was prescribed depression and anxiety medications, along with sleep aids, which did not mix well with the Bud Light “tall boys” he drank — “tallies,” he called them.
“I started the drugs and it was gacho, gacho,” Ortiz said in the video, the last two words overrriden by Calderon’s simultaneous translation of “bad, bad.”
As the interview continued, jurors looked confused, and at least one fell asleep, as Calderon continued to speak over Ortiz in the video. The men’s
“I started the drugs (for PTSD treatment) and it was gacho, gacho.” Juan David Ortiz, charged in the killings of Laredo prostitutes
voices collided and made it difficult to understand what either was saying.
Prosecutors halted Calderon’s testimony to present another witness from the Webb County Sheriff’s Office, David Nenque, who had to testify out of order because of a medical condition.
Alaniz initially sought the death penalty, but changed his mind after consulting with the families of the victims. If convicted, Ortiz, now 39, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.