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HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A federal immigration officer charged with aggravated assault after he ran over a Mexican man with his car in Houston has turned himself in.
13 video showed Mario Alberto Morales, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, walking inside the courtroom with his legal counsel on Monday morning. Cameras were not allowed inside. According to court records, Morales posted a non-arrest bond after a judge set his bond at $30,000.
Morales is accused of hitting Miguel Parra Hernandez, a 48-year-old construction worker, with his unmarked SUV on Oct. 10, as he chased Parra Hernandez through a parking lot.
A grand jury indicted Morales on Friday on a felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. On Monday, Morales appeared before a judge to answer that charge.
SEE ALSO: ICE agent indicted after running over man with vehicle, Harris County officials announce
Morales’s attorney, David Lindenmuth, previously told The Associated Press that Morales planned to turn himself in on Monday.
Lindenmuth also told the AP that the incident was “clearly just an accident” and that local officials had “invented a crime out of thin air.”
Prosecutors, on the other hand, said that the hit was intentional, arguing that Morales crossed a median and aggressively turned the wheel to strike Hernandez.
Michael Wynne, another Morales representative, questioned the case’s timing and said the grand jurors were “presented with one side of the story.”
“A side that Sean Teare decided to present, for whatever reason, on the last day of early voting… to make a certain news cycle,” Wynne said.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said, “As in every case that we prosecute in this courthouse, things need to come forward in a courtroom. Not at a podium. We don’t litigate these cases in the media or in the public. We do it in front of, eventually, a jury of the defendant’s peers.”
Wynne told 13 they will push to move the case to the federal level as soon as possible.
“We’ll press this case and litigate it the way the framers designed it, and that is in a federal forum,” Wynne said.
Teare said this is something they’re prepared for.
“We are fully anticipating that. We’ve been in preparation to combat that. We believe this case will eventually be tried in a Harris County Courthouse,” Teare said.
A lawyer not connected to the case, Kent Schaffer, told 13 that if the case moves to federal court, Morales could get immunity if his defense attorneys argue he acted within the scope of his employment as an ICE agent.
“If the judge finds that’s the case, then the case could be dismissed, but if the judge finds that the agent or officers’ actions were not necessary to enforce federal law, then the case is going to go to trial,” Schaffer said.
Morales is due back in court on Dec. 2.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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