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Ecatepec Couple Sentenced in Two More Killings of Women, Bringing Each to 287 Years

State of Mexico prosecutors said Juan Carlos Hernández and Patricia Martínez were sentenced for the deaths of a 17-year-old girl and a 33-year-old woman.

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Illustration: a plain concrete public building in a hillside suburb, a street vendor's cart with umbrellas and a minibus in front, passers-by seen from behind. Not the actual courthouse.

Prosecutors in the State of Mexico announced on Wednesday, September 25, 2019, two more prison sentences for Juan Carlos Hernández and Patricia Martínez, the married couple the Mexican press had named the Monsters of Ecatepec. Each was sentenced to 53 years and four months for the death of a 17-year-old girl in February 2018, and to 40 years for their part in the death of a 33-year-old woman in January 2017.

With those two terms, the state prosecutor's office said in a statement, each spouse had now been sentenced to a total of 287 years in prison. Two more cases were still pending against them, one for femicide, the killing of a woman because she is a woman, and one for a disappearance.

The couple had been arrested on October 4, 2018, on a street in the Jardines de Morelos neighborhood of Ecatepec, carrying human remains in a small cart. In reporting the new sentences, the EFE news agency described them as known for the killing of at least eight women.

Since the spring the convictions had come one after another. On May 20, 2019, they were sentenced to four years and six months for human trafficking, in the form of an illegal adoption, for selling a baby girl to another couple. Their first femicide sentence, 40 years, followed on June 11, and a second 40-year term on June 19. On August 7 they received 70 years for the femicide of a woman and her young daughter, and on August 20 another 40 years for a further femicide.

The case shook Mexico because it laid bare the violence the country's women live with. Ecatepec records more femicides than any other municipality in the country, and the State of Mexico, which is under a gender-violence alert, led the nation with 112 femicides in 2018, according to official figures from the national public security system. Across Mexico, 901 cases were recorded that year.

Sources