Mario Alberto Morales turned himself in Monday morning and appeared before a judge after a grand jury indicted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on a felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Court records show he posted a non-arrest bond.
The case now centers on Miguel Parra Hernandez, a 48-year-old construction worker who was struck on Oct. 10 when Morales chased him through a parking lot in Houston and hit him with an unmarked SUV. That sequence turned a pursuit into a criminal case with a named defendant, a felony charge and a bond hearing that put Morales back in court within days of the indictment.
Morales's attorney, David Lindenmuth, said Morales planned to turn himself in Monday and called the incident clearly just an accident, saying local officials had invented a crime out of thin air. Prosecutors took the opposite view, saying the hit was intentional and arguing that Morales crossed a median and aggressively turned the wheel to strike Hernandez. Michael Wynne said the grand jurors were presented with one side of the story, and added that Sean Teare decided to present it on the last day of early voting to make a certain news cycle.
Teare, for his part, said things need to come forward in a courtroom, not at a podium, and that the case would be handled in front of a jury of the defendant's peers. The dispute now sits where it is most likely to be resolved: in court, with the central question still unchanged from the start — whether the SUV strike was an accident or a deliberate act.
