El Salvadoran ‘Got Away’ Charged in Carjacking Killing in America’s Wealthiest County

On July 30, a local NBC affiliate reported that police had arrested Jose Aguilar-Martinez, aged 21, for the carjacking of a 54-year-old mother and grandmother, Melody Waldecker, in Sterling, Va., a D.C. suburb. Aguilar-Martinez allegedly hit and killed Waldecker as he was leaving the scene. Omitted from that report is a fact included by the local Fox outlet in its story about the arrest: the suspect is an illegal migrant from El Salvador. Regrettably, this is just another of those crimes that supposedly doesn’t happen.

The 7-Eleven in Loudon County. It’s possible, if not likely, that NBC4 News Washington had no idea of the suspect’s status at the time it ran its piece. 

Their report includes a lot of other facts that set the scene of that alleged crime: 

Melody Waldecker, 54, had just walked into a 7-Eleven at the Town Center at Sterling shopping center when she noticed a man getting into her Kia Sorento and tried to stop him, her family members said.

Jose Aguilar-Martinez, 21, took off in the Sorento and hit Waldecker with her own car, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s office said in a release Tuesday.

Waldecker, a mother of four and grandmother to eight, died at the scene of the crash, the sheriff’s office said.

Sterling is in the northeast corner of Loudoun County, and when I was a kid, almost all of it was farmland and two-lane roads. 

Forty-plus years of unprecedented federal spending, however, has transformed Loudoun into a toney bedroom community for D.C. powerbrokers and the contractors whose business is the U.S. government. 

In December 2023, U.S. News & World Report named Loudoun the wealthiest county in the United States, with a median household income of more than $170,000. 

It’s not the sort of place you’d think of when you hear that a middle-aged grandmother was killed in a carjacking, particularly given the violent crime rate there is 8 on a 1-100 scale, well below the national average of 22.7.

Waldecker herself apparently didn’t live there, however. She was a caregiver at a nursing home in nearby Montgomery County, Md., and had been visiting her own mother at a different nursing home in Leesburg, Va., when she stopped off at the 7-Eleven.

It’s unclear whether Aguilar-Martinez is a local, but the Migration Policy Institute claims that 19,000 of Loudoun’s 440,000 residents are “unauthorized” individuals, 29 percent of whom are from El Salvador. 

“Aguilar-Martinez Entered the U.S. As a ‘Gotaway’”. Fox News picked the story up from there, reporting on June 30 that: “Aguilar-Martinez entered the U.S. as a ‘gotaway’ at an unknown date and location”.

Technically, the term is “got away”, defined in 6 U.S.C. § 223(a)(3) as: “an unlawful border crosser who-(A) is directly or indirectly observed making an unlawful entry into the United States; (B) is not apprehended; and (C) is not a turn back”.

In other words, got aways are aliens who enter illegally without getting caught by Border Patrol. If you wonder why that term is defined in federal statute, it’s because the got away rate is a key metric that Congress has established to measure the “effectiveness of security between ports of entry”. 

By that standard, border security under the current administration hasn’t been very effective. As I explained last June, got aways have surged under the Biden-Harris administration, skyrocketing from fewer than 137,000 in FY 2020 to more than 670,000 in FY 2023, as agents – overwhelmed by the migrant rush – have been increasingly unable to stop those who don’t want to be caught.

All told, nearly 1.7 million got aways came in between FY 2021 and FY 2023, not counting about 175,000 others who had come into the country in FY 2024 through mid-May.

Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, who described the situation at the Southwest border as a “national security threat” during a March interview with CBS News, singled out the got away issue, explaining: 

what’s keeping me up at night is the . . . known got-aways. … Why are they risking their lives and crossing in areas where we can’t get to? Why are they hiding? What do they have to hide? What are they bringing in? What is their intent? Where are they coming from? We simply don’t know the answers to those questions. Those things for us are what represent the threat to our communities. 

If the Loudoun County police are correct (and Fox News is accurate), got away Jose Aguilar-Martinez plainly represented a threat to the community in America’s wealthiest enclave. 

The Debate Over Migrant Crime Rates . . . GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has made “migrant crime” a key talking point in his 2024 campaign, which (not surprisingly) has drawn the attention and derision of soi-disant media “fact checkers”. 

NBC News: “Trump’s claims of a migrant crime wave are not supported by national data”. Reuters: “studies show immigrants are not more likely to engage in criminality”. NPR: “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find”.

Many of those reports elide the difference between “immigrants” generally and the “unauthorized” population in particular. That’s a pretty important point, especially when talking about got aways.

Foreign nationals who come to the United States legally are twice vetted for criminality before they are admitted: once by consular officers before they issue the visas; and again, by CBP officers at the ports of entry. 

Legal immigrants should therefore, logically, commit few if any crimes, for the same reason crime rates for CIA employees – each of whom is subject to an extensive background check, which usually includes a polygraph – should be close to zero. 

Aliens who enter illegally but are caught receive a much more perfunctory screening before they are released (which under the current administration most are). That vetting largely involves checks of U.S. databases and the few foreign intelligence sources DHS has access to. 

Got aways don’t receive any scrutiny, at least not until they commit crimes here and come to the attention of local authorities. And given the fact many localities don’t ask criminals whether they are aliens, let alone ones here illegally, factual evidence regarding their crime rates is spotty at best.

In any event, that’s why those got aways keep Chief Owens “up at night”. 

As my colleague, Todd Bensman, recently explained, however, the question of whether illegal migrants commit more or fewer crimes than the general population misses the real point: Every crime they commit could have been prevented if they had not been allowed into the community. 

And every one of their victims could have been spared.

. . . And Crime Rates Generally. Trump has also spotlighted a purported increase in the crime rate generally under the current administration, again sending “nonpartisan” fact checkers on the attack. 

NBC News: “New FBI stats show ‘historic’ declines in violent crime rate, with murder showing sharpest drop”. NPR: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it”. CBS News: “FBI quarterly report shows 15% drop in violent crime compared to last year”.

The problem, as even the editorial board at the Washington Post recently had to admit, is that: 

The lead federal source for national data, the FBI, issues annual reports each October based on numbers gathered up to 18 months previously and reported – voluntarily and with varying degrees of accuracy – to the bureau by some 18,000 police agencies. . .. 

. . . . 

And yet the FBI’s new incident-reporting platform, intended to improve data quality, has made it more time-consuming and complex for police departments to send information to Washington. It has proven especially difficult for small, local agencies, nearly half of which have 10 or fewer officers on staff. As a result, only around two-thirds of the country’s agencies were using it to report incidents as of 2021. Recently, participation in the new system has increased, including large cities such as New York and Los Angeles. The [Council on Criminal Justice] predicts that it will cover 83 percent of the population this year. [Emphasis added.]

This dovetails with points made by John Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, in RealClear Politics on July 31. 

Lott explains there are two different “measures of crime”: the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System program, which “counts the number of crimes reported to police”; and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which “asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime”. 

According to Lott, the NCVS revealed that just 42 percent of violent crimes and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to the authorities in 2022, the last year for which statistics are available. 

That’s because, he posits: “Unreported crime has increased as law enforcement has collapsed, and that has reduced the rate at which people report crimes to police”. 

Consequently: 

Since 2020, the FBI’s number of reported crimes and the NCVS’s number of total crimes have been negatively correlated. For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1% drop in violent crime while the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4% – the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever recorded by the NCVS. 

At this point, I normally would quote Mark Twain and assert, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but honestly, I have no idea who is correct in this debate; both sides have their points. Perhaps corporate media should evidence such humility. 

What is clear is that many Americans are concerned about crime – particularly migrant crime – and if the local cops in America’s wealthiest suburb are correct, at least one mourning family has good reason to be upset about both.