U.S. President Joe Biden has commuted the death sentence for a serial killer and ex-Marine who killed two young girls at a park in Zion on Mother’s Day in 2005.
Jorge Avila-Torrez, a Zion native, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in Lake County Circuit Court on September 18, 2018.
As part of the negotiated plea, he was sentenced by Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes to 100 years in prison. The judge called him a serial killer during the sentencing.
Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9, were murdered in Beulah Park Nature Area in Zion on May 8, 2005.
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A witness saw the girls talking to someone who looked like Avila-Torrez, who was 16 years old at the time, according to court documents.
The girls did not return home that evening and a search party was deployed.
Hobbs’s father and grandfather eventually found the girls the next morning in a wooded area of the park.
Police and paramedics arrived and confirmed the girls were dead after suffering multiple stab wounds, court documents said.
Hobbs was stabbed 20 times. She suffered wounds to her abdomen, side and back as well as horizontal stab wounds perforating her eyelids.
Officials also discovered a significant amount of male DNA in Hobbs’s right hand.
Tobias was stabbed 11 times. She suffered wounds in her stomach, intestines, liver, neck, windpipe and cervical spine.
Jerry Hobbs, Laura Hobbs’s father who was a convicted felon, was arrested within days and charged in the murders after confessing to the crime.
Jerry Hobbs, who spent five years in jail awaiting trial, was excluded as a suspect based on DNA analysis after evidence collected during the autopsy was sent to the crime laboratory, court documents said.
He later filed a lawsuit against police in Waukegan, Vernon Hills, Zion and each of the cities, along with then-Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Waller, and received over $7.5 million for the wrongful arrest.
The lab also tested semen found on Hobbs’s clothing and body but officials were unable to determine a source.
The DNA records were put into a nationwide database and periodically checked for a match.
In July 2019, Avila-Torrez murdered Amanda Jean Snell, 20, who was a Petty Officer Second Class for the U.S. Navy, at Keith Hall at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, prosecutors said.
Avila-Torrez was a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps and lived in a room on the same deck as Snell.
He was not arrested until February 2010 after he abducted two women and sexually assaulted one of them, leaving her on the side of the road after strangling her, in Arlington, Virginia.
He also attempted to abduct and rob another woman in a separate incident.
Court documents said Avila-Torrez’s DNA was entered into the system after those crimes and he was found to be a potential match in the Zion murders.
Further testing showed that Avila-Torrez was a match for the clothing and body DNA as only one in every 985 quadrillion individuals would be expected to have the same profile.
Avila-Torrez was sentenced to five life sentences without parole in December 2010 for the Virginia abductions and later sentenced by a jury to death for the Snell murder in April 2014.
On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 out of 40 individuals who were on federal death row.
The sentences were reclassified from execution to life without the possibility of parole.
Avila-Torrez was among the 37 individuals who had their death sentences commuted.
“President Biden has dedicated his career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system. He believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder – which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases,” the White House said in a statement.
“When President Biden came into office, his Administration imposed a moratorium on federal executions, and his actions today will prevent the next Administration from carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice,” the statement said.
When reached for comment on Friday, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart acknowledged that while Biden has the right to make the decision, he hoped that the president reached out to the Hobbs and Tobias families who were “devasted by this offender’s actions in Lake County.”
“Meaningful family contact is a critical step in our justice system which must always be performed in a trauma-informed way,” Rinehart said, adding that his office had not yet been able to reach out to the family on Friday.
“We will also add that it does not appear the White House or the Department of Justice reached out to our office which handled the state case until the 2018 plea under Former State’s Attorney Nerheim. We do not know if former State’s Attorney Nerheim was contacted,” Rinehart said.
The state’s attorney also said that it cannot be forgotten that the “horrific murders” led prior state’s attorney administrations to seek the Illinois death penalty against the wrong man — Jerry Hobbs.
“All decisions by prosecutors and presidents must be performed carefully and with a victim-centered approach. We hope the White House did that here,” Rinehart said.
