D.A. CONFIRMS: VICIOUS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SUSPECT CAUGHT

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Amado Martinez, 39, – alleged to have viciously tortured and beaten a former domestic partner and left her for dead September 15  was arrested and jailed today – Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz has confirmed.

"He will be held in the Brownsville Police Dept. jail on Jackson Street and will be arraigned tomorrow for aggravated assault, Family Violence, a second-degree felony," Saenz said. "He's off the street."

Brownsville Police, Cameron County Sheriff's Department and the U.S. Marshal's Fugitive Force were deployed and seeking Martinez since the September 15 assault on charges that brutally beat, tortured, and left for dead Veronica Rivas Cespedes who hovered between life and death for more than a week in the Intensive Care Unit of  a local hospital.

Family members and friends said Cespedes was allegedly tortured – which included the pulling off of her fingernails and the chopping off her hair – before she  was left for dead from the vicious beating. Police said that the assault happened inside the woman's bedroom at her apartment on 2426 Barnard Street.

When police arrived on the scene, the victim was lying on the basketball court and had been severely beaten, had several lacerations to her face but was able to identify her attacker as her former boyfriend

before being hospitalized in the ICU.

Sanez said that the attack took place Sept. 15 and a warrant for the alleged aggressor was issued the next day. Police suspected that Martinez had fled the city and efforts to find him were unsuccessful until today, he said. Family members and friends had criticized the BPD because it had not issued any reports or statement on the incident. The woman reportedly was kept in the ICU for almost two weeks or more as a result of the assault. 

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.