A man with ties to a Mexican cartel who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and torturing a Dallas couple was deported before serving time for the murders.
Nicolas Monarrez is a cartel hitman who, along with two accomplices, held teenagers Linoshka Torres and Luis Campos captive before murdering them in 2017, according to WFAA. Monarrez mistakenly believed the couple had stolen drugs and money from him.
Monarrez was sentenced to 15 years in a Texas prison for the murders, but he first had to serve 10 years in federal prison on unrelated drug charges. Once the initial sentence was complete, Monarrez was supposed to be transferred to the Texas Department of Corrections.
Instead, he was deported.
“He just did the drug charges. That’s it,” Rachel Torres, Linoshka’s sister, told WFAA.
Torres contacted officials after she received a letter from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicating that Monarrez had been deported before serving time for the murder of Torres’ sister — who was five months pregnant — and her sister’s boyfriend. Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said his office was trying to identify the errors that led to the grave mistake.
“There were major failures where paperwork was not properly filed by prosecutors at the time,” he told WFAA.
However, Creuzot, who was not a district attorney at the time of Monarrez’s release, has himself been criticized for allowing criminals to walk free. Some of his approaches were highly contested by Dallas residents, such as not prosecuting for thefts under $750, a policy he later reversed, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Creuzot said officials were working to untangle the complex legal process of reversing the deportation so Monarrez might return to serve his sentence for the murders.
Monarrez, meanwhile, remains a free man in Mexico. He pleaded guilty to murdering the couple and their unborn child after holding them hostage in his shed while he and two accomplices strangled, electrocuted, and beat them.
”He took them and did some horrible things to them,” Torres told WFAA.
After killing the couple, Monarrez and two others dumped their bodies off a bridge on Dowdy Ferry Road in southeast Dallas. The parts of Dowdy Ferry within the city of Dallas fall in City Council District 8, represented by Council Member Tennell Atkins.
There have been 153 murders in Dallas so far this year, up 6.25% from this time last year, according to the City’s August 5 crime briefing.
Neighboring cities like Fort Worth have successfully reduced their crime by instituting a dedicated downtown police force, which Dallas does not currently have. A report found that Dallas has a shortage of about 900 of the recommended 4,000 police officers.
