Elkin René Corrales Morazán, a 22-year-old Hispanic man, was killed on February 19, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana, after what began as an ordinary night among people who knew one another and ended in sudden violence. Police responding to a call on Clara Street found him unresponsive on a mattress, his body bearing multiple stab wounds. He was still alive when help arrived, but the injuries were severe, and he later died from them.
Accounts published in Nicaragua described Corrales as
a young man from Somoto, Madriz, who had been in the United States for only about a year and a half, working as a painter and trying to build a life far from home. Those same reports said the stabbing followed a drinking-fueled argument and fight, and that the person blamed was someone Corrales had treated as a friend: Martín Jarquín Estrada. In those retellings, the attack came when the confrontation seemed to be ending—when Corrales turned away—leaving him wounded and collapsing as the other man fled.
In the days that followed, his death rippled back across borders. Nicaraguan coverage reported that his family faced the painful logistics of bringing him home, and that his body was repatriated to Somoto for burial. They wrote about a family stunned by the betrayal and about the child he left behind, a life altered before it could even form lasting memories.
Investigators in New Orleans identified a suspect as Martin Jose Jarquin-Estrada, described in a later U.S. Marshals-related account as a Nicaraguan citizen wanted for the 2017 murder. Authorities said efforts to find him locally failed because he had fled the area and then left the country. The search stretched on for more than two years before law enforcement located him in Zacatecas, Mexico, where he was arrested on October 15, 2019. After the arrest, he was brought to Houston, Texas, as an initial point of entry into the United States, with the expectation that he would be sent on to New Orleans to face the case there.
Publicly available accounts linked to the investigation focus on the identification of Jarquin-Estrada as the suspect and his eventual capture in Mexico. They do not provide clear, consistent public details about any final court outcome such as a trial date, conviction, or sentencing, beyond describing him as arrested and awaiting transfer to face the murder allegation in New Orleans.
