BOND REVOKED ON ACCUSED DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SUSPECT

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

A state district judge ordered the revocation of a $15,000 bond for evading arrest on a man later charged with aggravated assault on a Brownsville woman who relatives said was savagely beaten tortured, and  then left for dead.

Judge Juan Magallanes, of the 357th District Court, granted the Cameron County District Attorney Office prosecutors their motion to revoke the $15,000 bond of  Amado Martinez, 39, on a previous charge of evading arrest filed against him on October 2018 by the Cameron County Sheriff's department. 

Magallanes did not grant the DA's office motion to deny bond in the aggravated Assault Family Violence and let a $1,000,000 bond set by Brownsville Municipal Court Judge Rigoberto Flores Monday, October 18, stand. The attack on the woman was reported September 15 and a warrant issued the next day.

For more than a month, Martinez had been on the run eluding law enforcement investigators – including the U.S. Marshal's Fugitive Task Force – before he was apprehended.  

Martinez was charged with aggravated assault after he allegedly beat the woman in her apartment, pulled her nails and chopped her hair. Police later found the woman lying on the apartment complex's basketball court. She was able to identify her attacker before she was hospitalized.

The woman, Veronica Rivas Cespedes, remained in the Intensive Care Unit of a local hospital for almost two weeks. Martinez, is alleged to have viciously tortured and beaten his former girlfriend after she let him in her apartment. 

 Police said that the assault happened inside the woman's bedroom at her apartment on 2426 Barnard Street.

Cameron County District Attorney's Luis Saenz said that police suspected that Martinez had fled the city and efforts to find him had been  unsuccessful. Family members and friends had criticized the BPD because it had not issued any reports or statements on the incident.  

Friends say that the aggressor became livid after he saw a posting on Facebook which he believed showed the victim fraternizing with customers at her workplace in the course of her work.

BPD investigators did not issue any public statements or reports to the media or the public of her alleged aggressor, who was said by her co-workers to have fled to Houston. But no one really knew.

 Initially, BPD told some news media representatives that there was no ongoing investigation into the assault. 

But a photo of the obviously battered woman made the rounds of social media and among her friends and showed that she was the victim of a savage beating. Comments to this blog indicate that the assailant had believed the woman was dead before he fled.

"They told the family to keep quiet make believe that she was dead so they could make an arrest," said a family friend. "They did not inform the public that this vicious aggressor was walking the streets. If they had, maybe someone would have seen him and alerted the authorities to prevent him from doing this to someone else."

Her co-workers at the lounge where she works held a fundraiser to help her with medical expenses about a week and a half ago.

Cespedes, a single mother, worked at the Toucan lounge, but is well known in the city because she performs with the popular band Picasso.

As a result of the bond revocation, Martinez will be held at the Rucker-Carrizalez Detention Center in Olmito until his trial on the evading arrest charge. He will later stand trial on the aggravated assault charge, Saenz said.