Illegal Immigrant Accused of Stabbing VA Teen Should Have Been Deported Months Before Murder

An illegal immigrant accused of brutally murdering a teenager in Virginia in 2010 should have been deported three months before he stabbed the victim 13 times and left her to die in a ravine.

Illegal immigrant Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia has admitted to killing Vanessa Pham, 19, after he begged her to give him and his infant daughter a ride to the hospital while he was high on PCP.

According to his account, Blanco-Garcia was hallucinating while high on PCP he had bought earlier in the day. He thought Pham was going to do him and his one-year old daughter harm when she accidentally made a wrong turn while taking the strangers to the hospital. He then “took out a butcher’s knife” from his backpack and stabbed her 13 times. Pham crashed her car into a ravine while she was being stabbed; her dead body was later discovered. 

Blanco-Garcia, though, should never have been on the streets.

According to a report, the “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was notified of Blanco-Garcia’s 2010 misdemeanor for public intoxication and planned to file paperwork to take custody of him.” But Blanco-Garcia “was released by local authorities on personal recognizance before he could be fingerprinted based on the low-level nature of the charge.” 

Blanco-Garcia reportedly spent four hours at an adult detention center. According to ICE, he “entered the United States legally in 2002 with a visa but stayed past the six-month period for which it was authorized.”

After police were stumped for nearly two years in their investigation of Pham’s murder, a break in the case came when Blanco-Garcia was arrested for stealing three bottles of champagne from a grocery store in McLean, Virginia in 2012. 

A spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform said this should be a “wake-up call” for the public about what can happen when ICE “doesn’t send the paddy wagon.”

Blanco-Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the charge of premeditate murder. A search of his computer found that he had been tracking the progress of the investigation for two years.