The family of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old Houston girl who was allegedly murdered last week by two illegal immigrants, is joining calls for a better ‘safe country’ and more robust border protections in order to spare other families from suffering through the same type of tragedy.
“We have to stop burying our kids,” Jocelyn’s mom, Alexis Nungaray, cried as she spoke with a news outlet on Tuesday. “This isn’t right. We have to have more reinforcement when it comes to letting people in. This is not okay.”
Prosecutors said Nungaray resisted her attackers who had led her under a bridge, assaulted her sexually, and then bound her and killed her.
“The case is horrific. Jocelyn’s last moments were unspeakable,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “She endured assault for multiple hours. This was a little girl who slipped out of her house to call her boyfriend, a 13-year-old, was seen by two immigrants who had been drinking all afternoon, they picked her up probably asking for directions and she was innocent. She walked off with them. We see footage from local stores that show they lured her under a bridge near a Houston bayou where they attacked her, strangled her and dragged her body into the water.”
During the talk, one of the details that Jocelyn’s grandfather, Kelvin Alvarenga, brought up in her family is that a suspect named Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, was wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surveillance ankle bracelet at the time.
“You’re not going to tell me that with an ankle monitor you are good to go,” Alvarenga said. “You don’t just wake up one day and decide you are going to commit this horrific crime. These are people that come who were used to doing this type of thing. It’s just sad it happens all over the country. We need a safer country.”
The grandfather made a direct appeal to the lawmakers.
“I would like the people that can make changes to our laws to just sit back and reflect,” he said. “I don’t know if we can transmit the pain that we’re having through cameras but please sit back and reflect and think of all these little angels that shouldn’t have been taken away, and they have for the reason that we’re not doing what we need to, screening these people.”
His granddaughter, he said, was a “fighter” and a “leader.
“I want the nation all around the world to understand that she was a child. She was my child, my firstborn,” Alexis said. “She was a preteen that was slowly becoming this beautiful young lady, and she was going so far. She had dreams and aspiring goals she wanted to do in life. She was going to make it. She was going to do things and these men, these illegal men, took that opportunity from my daughter, from our family, of watching her become this amazing person.
Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, and Johan Josue Martinez-Rangel, 22, were both charged with capital murder.
