U.S. Border Patrol Agent Convicted of Killing 4 Sex Workers He Solicited
“I wanted to clean up the streets," Juan David Ortiz told investigators, adding that sex workers "are dirt, and I was going to get rid of them."
JusticePolitics
An ex-border patrol agent in Texas was convicted of killing four women in 2018 by a jury on Wednesday. Juan David Ortiz specifically targeted sex workers—identified as Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Anne Luera, Guiselda Alicia Cantu, and Janelle Ortiz—whom he admitted to soliciting and then killing.
Amid the trial, which began last week, jurors were shown a taped confession in which Ortiz told investigators that he’d sought out and paid for sex from the women he killed. He referred to the women as “trash” and claimed, “I wanted to clean up the streets. These people… are dirt, and I was going to get rid of them. Law enforcement doesn’t do anything about them? I will. I’m sick of them.”
Ortiz’s defense attorneys tried to dismiss the taped confession, claiming that it had been improperly obtained and that as a Navy veteran, Ortiz had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, nightmares, and headaches on the night he made the confession. Of course, as prosecutors have pointed out, Ortiz was an “educated” senior law enforcement official with a better understanding of his rights than most detained people.
The killings and Ortiz’s role in them only came to law enforcement’s attention one evening in September 2018, when a woman named Erika Pena escaped from Ortiz’s truck as he held a gun to her head. Pena testified that Ortiz told her he had been the “next to last person” to have sex with Ramirez, one of the women he’d killed, whose body had been found a week earlier. Pena had known Ramirez not only as a fellow sex worker, but as one of her friends, she said.