We often hear (and report) about murders where the main suspect is presumed to have fled to Mexico.
But the border door swings both ways.
Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports Mexican national Mateo Perez Hernandez was recently arrested in La Habra and transported back to Mexico, where he was wanted for a 2010 murder.
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Hernandez had been deported from the U.S. to Mexico in February 2010. In September of that year, his brother and a fellow named Eduardo Fernandez got into a heated argument outside a party in Mexicali. Hernandez is alleged to have intervened, killing Fernandez with a baseball bat.
The FBI notified ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in San Diego last month that 28-year-old Hernandez was wanted for murder on the Baja peninsula, according to an ICE release. Further investigation led authorities to believe Hernandez was in La Habra, and that tip was forwarded to police there as well as ICE's Los Angeles office on Aug. 8.
On Aug. 25, cops in La Habra detained Hernandez on a drug charge. The police department alerted ERO's San Diego's Fugitive Operations Team, which took the suspect into custody. His previous deportation order paved the way for his repatriation to Mexico Monday, ICE reports.
Hernandez was remanded to the custody of representatives from the Mexican Attorney General's Office at the San Ysidro border crossing Monday afternoon under tight security, according to ICE.
“Violent criminals who seek to escape responsibility for their actions by fleeing to the U.S. will find no sanctuary in our communities,” says Gregory J. Archambeault, field office director for ERO San Diego, in the ICE release. “As this case makes clear, ICE works closely with its international partners through its HSI Office of International Affairs to promote public safety and hold criminals accountable-no matter where they commit their crimes.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.