A 22-year-old man who abducted and murdered a 17-year-old girl near a mosque in Virginia was in this country illegally, according to an ICE detainer request.
Nabra Hussein, of Sterling, North Virginia, was reported missing after she and a group of friends left an all-night prayer session at a mosque to walk to a McDonald’s at 4 a.m. on Sunday.
The girls had breakfast and were returning to the mosque to begin their fasts at sunrise during the holy month of Ramadan.
Police say the girls were walking in and out of the roadway when a car drove up. The driver, Darwin Martinez Torres, a native of El Salvador, got out of the car wielding an aluminum baseball bat. An argument ensued between Torres and the girls.
Nabra, an Egyptian-American who was more westernized than her Muslim friends, argued the loudest.
Torres reportedly began beating her with the bat when she tripped on the hem of her abaya and fell.
The frightened girls ran back to the mosque before realizing Nabra wasn’t with them.
Nabra usually didn’t wear traditional Muslim garments, but her mother, Sawsan Gazzar, had given her an abaya, a robe-like dress, to wear to the mosque on Saturday night.
During an intense search for the missing girl, police stopped Torres who was driving “suspiciously close” to the scene of the attack.
After an interrogation at police headquarters Torres led officers to the badly beaten body of a female in a retention pond across the street from his apartment complex at about 3 p.m. Sunday.
An aluminum baseball bat was recovered near the pond.
“What investigators told the father and the mother, he hit her in the head and put her in the car and he threw her in the water,” said family friend and spokesperson Abas Sherif.
Police released a statement on Monday calling the homicide a road rage incident. The statement said the “investigation at this point in no way indicates the victim was targeted because of her race or religion.”
An online crowd funding website raised over $155,000 for Nabra’s family.
NBC4 reported “ICE has lodged a detainer against” Torres because he is in the country illegally.
That means he will be deported if he is convicted of Nabra’s death and serves out his sentence.
Torres was able to enter the country illegally thanks to former President Barack Obama’s lenient open borders policy.
The Obama administration brazenly relocated thousands of illegal immigrants in every state hoping to influence the 2016 presidential election.
