US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is urging North Carolina authorities to continue holding a Salvadoran national accused in a fatal hit-and-run crash that left three people dead.
Javiel Pena Sola, a citizen of El Salvador, is accused of hitting a vehicle carrying three people in Salisbury on July 18 and then leaving the crash scene.
ICE said officers later located him with assistance from a police K-9.
Two of the victims were declared dead at the scene. A third person was flown to a hospital but later died from their injuries.
“I heard people screaming … and they pulled the man out; and as they pulled him out, he started screaming,” witness Quindel Woods told WSOC-TV.
Authorities later discovered Sola’s vehicle in a creek. He faces three counts of hit-and-run involving serious injury or death.
ICE has filed a detainer request with local officials seeking to keep Sola in custody.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said Sola had been arrested in 2016 and released. She also said he entered the United States through Arizona in April 2022.
“Although ICE had arrested him in 2016, the Obama Administration RELEASED him into American communities,” she said. “These deaths were 100% preventable. Open borders and sanctuary policies have deadly consequences.”
Sola’s criminal history includes prior convictions for reckless endangerment, failure to stop after an accident involving damage to an attended vehicle, and driving without a license in Maryland in July 2015, as well as an arrest for escaping from custody.
After his arrest in Maryland on charges of escaping from custody, law enforcement officials in Baltimore honored an ICE detainer and turned him over to federal agents in March 2016. He was then released by the Obama administration two months later, ICE said.
