Two men have been charged with capital murder in the death of a 12-year-old girl whose body was found in a north Houston creek. She had been strangled.
Police and court records show that on Friday, Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, and Franklin Pena, 26, were charged with the capital murder of a child between the ages of 10 and 15.
The body of Jocelyn Nungaray was found at 6:15 a.m. on Monday. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences said she died from being strangled, according to Houston police.
Thursday, officials said they had been working nonstop to get the person who killed Jocelyn off the streets. It was surveillance video and witnesses who helped the cops make the arrests on Thursday, officials said.
Kevin Satterwhite, the acting police chief of Houston, said, “The teams were out there looking through every possible video feed and talking to everyone who might have seen or heard something.” Their hard work paid off because we were able to find video and follow our suspects and Jocelyn all the way to the place where she was killed and dumped in the water in a swamp.
Satterwhite said that tests would show if the girl had been sexually abused.
John Whitmire, the mayor of Houston, said the case was terrible.
He said, “As mayor, grandfather, and father, it doesn’t get any worse.”
Police in Houston, led by Lt. Stephen Hope, said that the suspects were seen on a security camera leaving a restaurant together on Sunday night. Later, the men were seen talking to Jocelyn, and the three of them walked to a convenience store together. There, cops said, pictures were taken of them and later made public.
Hope said that Jocelyn was killed when the three of them walked to a bridge.
Hope said that the suspects and Jocelyn were together for a few hours before she was killed.
John Donnelly, a spokesman for the county’s district attorney’s office, said that Martinez-Rangel and Pena were being held in the Harris County Jail on Friday afternoon.
Martinez-Rangel and Pena were set to appear in court for the first time on Friday during a probable cause hearing in front of a judge. Donnelly said that prosecutors planned to ask for a $1 million bond for each suspect.
Late Friday night, it wasn’t clear if Martinez-Rangel and Pena had hired lawyers.
As of Friday afternoon, the suspects were not eligible for the death sentence. However, Donnelly said, that could change as their cases move through the courts.
On both suspects’ court records, Immigration and Customs Enforcement put holds on them because they broke immigration laws.
At the press conference on Thursday, the authorities said that anyone who wanted to know about the suspects’ immigration status should contact Homeland Security Investigations. I tried to get in touch with someone Friday at the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or ICE but could not reach anyone.
The mother of Jocelyn, Alexis Nungaray, told the Houston NBC affiliate KPRC that she had never seen the two guys before. She didn’t know if her daughter knew them, and she told the news station that they didn’t live in the same building as her and Jocelyn.
