Border Patrol agents found their colleagues brutally battered in a culvert along a southwest Texas highway after a desperate call for help, the FBI revealed Monday.
Slain Agent Rogelio Martinez, 36, and his partner were attacked Saturday night while patrolling 12 miles east of the border town of Van Horn, according to federal investigators.
The wounded partner’s radio call for help prompted the rescue.
Agents assigned to the Van Horn Station found the duo around 11:30 p.m. along Interstate 10. Both agents had severe traumatic head injuries and broken bones, said Agent Jeanette Harper, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s El Paso field office.
Martinez died the next morning at a Van Horn hospital. His partner remains hospitalized in stable condition at a El Paso hospital.
The deadly attack prompted a renewed cry from President Trump to build a border wall to Mexico even as the circumstances leading up to the attack remain elusive into the second day of the FBI’s probe.
The surviving agent does not remember what happened and has been unable to provide concrete details of the apparent attack, according to an U.S. official with knowledge of the probe.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Martinez may have fallen 14-feet into the culvert.
National Border Patrol Council union boss Art Del Cueto said he believes the two agents were attacked with rocks, a detail FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protections officials have declined to confirm.
Harper said neither agent was shot.
The Big Bend Sector agents were checking on a sensor near the highway and “one agent was murdered,” Del Cueto told KTSM-TV.
Martinez’s father, Jose Martinez, said a border supervisor called him with news of his son’s injuries around 3 a.m. Sunday, according to the El Paso Times.
He assumed his agent son had been in a car crash before seeing the grim state of his body at the hospital. The grief-stricken father told the paper Martinez suffered three instances of cardiac arrest and that his son’s head was “destroyed.”
Jose Martinez said he never wanted his son to work the border but the four-year veteran of the federal force loved it.
“I would tell him, ‘Son that job is too dangerous.’ But he would say, ‘Dad, it’s the job I like,” the dad told the Times.
“I want to prevent terrorists and drugs from coming into the country,” he quoted his son as saying.
Authorities have not released information on the assailant responsible for the late night assault but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
“We owe a great deal of gratitude to the brave men and women of the United States Border Patrol who serve every day to protect our homeland,” Abbott said in a statement.
“Cecilia and I offer our deepest condolences to the families of the agents killed and seriously injured in this attack. As authorities continue their investigation, it is important that they receive any and all information to help apprehend and deliver swift justice to those responsible.”
With News Wire Services
