US Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez found mortally injured beside a West Texas highway died of ‘blunt force trauma’ to his head caused by an ‘undetermined manner of death,’ according to an autopsy report.
The report sheds little new light on what caused Martinez’s head injuries, which has prompted the victim’s fiancee to publicly accuse the government of a cover-up.
The 36-year-old agent had multiple bone fractures when he and the other agent were both found hurt on November 18, 2017, in a culvert beside Interstate 10 near Van Horn, Texas.
Dr. Janice Diaz-Cavalliery, assistant El Paso County medical examiner, found that Martinez had a skull fracture, a fractured eye socket, multiple rib fractures and a broken collarbone, according to the 11-page report released on Tuesday night. She found brain hemorrhaging but no other internal injuries.
A barbiturate called Butalbital – often found in drugs combined with aspirin, codeine or caffeine – was in Martinez’s system, Diaz-Cavalliery found.
‘Signs noted following its administration include drowsiness, sedation and ataxia,’ she wrote. Ataxia is an inability to coordinate movements.
In an interview with the station KTSM on Tuesday night, Martinez’s fiancee, Angie Ochoa, called into question the autopsy’s findings, particularly the part concerning the barbiturate allegedly detected in the agent’s blood.
‘They found Butalbital in his system and when the FBI questioned me about it, I made it very clear to them that Roger would not even take Ibuprofen or Aspirin,’ she said.
Ochoa went even farther when addressing the autopsy in a Facebook post early Wednesday morning.
‘I’m well aware who I’m going up against after this bulls**t report but I’m not going to sit here with my arms crossed anymore,’ the woman wrote. ‘[Don’t tell me to be careful with my words because it’s what I’ve been doing for the last 2 1/2 months. I’m just stating the obvious! And I’m not going stop after this!’
Responding to a supporter’s comment, Ochoa suggested that Martinez and his partner could not call for help because of poor reception and accused government officials of hiding the truth because ‘they just want to “build a wall.”‘
Martinez’s partner, who had suffered similar injuries, radioed for help while the two were investigating a report of activity outside of Van Horn, about 110 miles of El Paso and about 30 miles from the border with Mexico.
Martinez died at a hospital a few hours later. His partner has recovered, but investigators say he doesn’t remember what happened.
Some elected officials, including President Donald Trump, initially called the incident an attack, and FBI officials said they were investigating it as a potential assault.
In a tweet sent out the next day after the incident in Texas, Trump wrote: ‘We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!;
A Border Patrol union, the National Border Patrol Council, has said the pair were attacked and struck with a rock or rocks, and that the scene was ‘grisly.’
But Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo, one of the first responders at the scene, has said he thinks a semitrailer may have hit Martinez and his partner accidentally.
‘From the beginning we were radioed to assist in the incident as an injury, not an assault,’ Carrillo told The Dallas Morning News.
Following the release of the autopsy report on Tuesday, National Border Patrol Council’s spokesman Chris Cabrera maintained that Agent Martinez was murdered, saying ‘there’s no way he was hit by a vehicle.’
The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information that would help solve this case. Texas is offering another $20,000 reward for similar information.