Jury Can’t Be Seated In Gruesome Rape Case; Venue Hearing Scheduled
(July 9, 2007)—Jury selection ended abruptly Monday morning in Groesbeck in the trial of an illegal immigrant charged in the gruesome abduction, rape and attempted murder of a Limestone County teenager who was stabbed and left for dead on a rural roadside.

A district court judge set a hearing on whether to move the trial of Noel Darwin Hernandez after determining that an impartial jury could not be seated in Limestone County.

Hernandez is charged with aggravated robbery, aggravated sexual assault and attempted capital murder in the June 2006 abduction, rape and stabbing.


He was to have gone on trial on the aggravated kidnapping charge.

Hernandez and Javier Guzman-Martinez were indicted last September in connection with the attack.

Guzman-Martinez pleaded guilty in a plea-agreement and was sentenced to a life term.

The victim of the June 2006 attack was a recent Mexia High School graduate whose car was run off a rural road.

The teenager was kidnapped and then raped repeatedly, beaten and stabbed during a terrifying three-hour drive.

The teenager was dumped along a rural roadside and left for dead, but bleeding profusely, the girl somehow made her way to a house a half-mile away where she awakened residents with a faint knock on the front door.

Guzman-Martinez was later arrested in Limestone County and Hernandez of Honduras was arrested at a bus station in Waco as he tried to leave the country.
The hearing on a change of venue motion is scheduled for July 20.

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