(The Center Square) – A recent homicide in Dallas is the latest to involve a Cuban national charged with decapitating a victim in the U.S.
On Sept. 10, Dallas Police Department officers arrested Cuban national Yordanis Cobos-Martinez on murder charges after they say he used a machete to behead his coworker, Indian national Chandra Mouli Nagamallaiah. Nagamallaiah, who came to the U.S. in 2018, was reportedly killed in front of his spouse and child, authorities said. Both men worked at Downtown Suites in Dallas.
Cobos-Martinez has been living in the U.S. illegally and has a final removal order from a federal immigration judge, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was previously held in ICE Dallas custody at the Bluebonnet Detention Center but was released by the Biden administration on an Order of Supervision on Jan. 13, 2025, ICE said. He was released despite his lengthy violent criminal history, including arrests and/or convictions on charges of child sex abuse in Houston, grand theft of a motor vehicle in Florida, and false imprisonment and carjacking in California, according to ICE.
According to his arrest affidavit, the detective on the case said, “The suspect then kicked the [Nagamallaiah’s] head twice into the parking lot and proceeded to pick it up and carry it to the dumpster and put it inside,” CBS News reported.
ICE lodged a detainer request with the Dallas County Jail to arrest Cobos-Martinez and process him for removal.
This is not the first alleged beheading by Cuban national in the U.S.
In July 2021, America Thayer, a legal immigrant living in Minnesota, was beheaded in broad daylight at a traffic intersection in Shakopee. She was murdered in front of witnesses by Cuban national Alexis Saborit, who had been illegally living in the U.S. for years. His criminal history included multiple convictions of domestic abuse, DUI and others in Louisiana and Minnesota, according to authorities. An attempt to deport him in 2012 failed because the Cuban government refused to accept him. Under the Trump administration, agreements are being reached with countries to take back their citizens as well as criminal foreign nationals who aren’t their citizens so they can be removed from the U.S.
Saborit had been released into the community by judges on bond prior to killing Thayer, Crime Watch Minneapolis reported. In 2023, a judge ruled he was “not guilty by reason of mental illness” and ordered that he be transferred to a facility operated by the state health department, Alpha News reported.
In another decapitation case in Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in May denied an appeal made by a Brownsville man, John Allen Rubio, currently on Death Row. He was convicted in 2010 for the 2003 beheading of his three children who were between the ages of two months and three years old at the time. He was twice convicted by two juries in a lengthy litigation process. His common-law-wife and mother of all three murdered children was also convicted and is serving life in prison.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz maintains Rubio “should be executed for his ‘especially harrowing’ crime” and the verdict of death by lethal injection be carried out.
Also in the Rio Grande Valley, several men were convicted in a capital murder case in which a Honduran national was killed and decapitated by an alleged Gulf Cartel member. The case also involved a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was eventually found not guilty of the decapitation but guilty of two organized crime counts related to drug trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
The recent U.S. decapitations exclude those committed in Mexican cities located just miles from U.S. cities along the border stretching from California to Texas. Decapitations are often carried out by cartel members as a means to execute rivals and send warnings to members of the public, authorities have explained to The Center Square.
