NEW YORK – A man who along with others held a woman hostage in Weslaco, Texas, after she was smuggled across the border was charged with hostage taking and alien smuggling, federal officials announced Wednesday.
Juvencio Martinez-Martinez, 20, of Weslaco, Texas, was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York.
After smuggling the victim who is from El Salvador across the U.S.-Mexican border and while waiting to get a money order to secure her release, Martinez and others threatened to cut the victim into pieces, officials said. In a telephone conversation, Martinez said they’d send the pieces to her mother in Fallsburg, Sullivan County, New York, according to federal officials.
Martinez was apprehended at a business in Weslaco, Texas, shortly after he obtained an additional $1,500 from the victim’s mother, officials said. Law enforcement officers then discovered additional people at a building Martinez controlled.
Officials said said Martinez “valued currency over human life” when he abducted the victim who was trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico.
“While he may have viewed this as an opportunity to make easy money, Martinez-Martinez did not anticipate the swift, coordinated law enforcement response committed to seeing the victim safely rescued,” said Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelo with the FBI’s New York office.
The Times Herald Record reported that Martinez’s arrest came MoneyGram called Fallsburg police to report an unusually high payment of $1,500, Police Chief Simmie Williams said.
Police were given a name and narrowed the mother’s location to the Red Maple Court apartments in South Fallsburg.
Fallsburg Detective Brendan Pavese and Officer John Chevalier spent an hour knocking on doors at the apartment complex before they located the mother, Williams told the Times Herald.
The woman told Fallsburg officers she had come to the United States to work and make money to bring her daughter here. She paid the smugglers an agreed-upon amount, but they demanded more money, according to the Times Herald.
“When we got to her door “» she started crying and invited us in,” Pavese told the Times Herald.
Martinez-Martinez was arrested in Weslaco on May 15 as he went to retrieve the $1,500 payment from MoneyGram.
“It was a major human smuggling and kidnapping operation,” Williams told the Times Herald.
Martinez is facing up to life in prison if convicted. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty.