Fernando Cota’s remaining resting place is not among the many nation’s heroes.
Cota, a convicted rapist and alleged serial killer, had his stays disinterred from Fort Sam Houston Nationwide Cemetery in Texas earlier this week, in keeping with a press launch from Sen. John Cornyn’s workplace.
Cota’s elimination comes after a federal legislation was handed final December permitting for the Vietnam soldier’s stays to be disinterred from the cemetery. The laws was launched by Cornyn (R-Texas) and co-sponsored by fellow Texas senator Ted Cruz. The invoice was signed into legislation by President Donald Trump as a part of the Nationwide Protection Authorization Act for fiscal 12 months 2026.
The legislation gave Division of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins the directive to take away Cota’s stays.
Cornyn was happy to listen to that his laws labored, and a violent felony would not be buried in the identical cemetery as different veterans.
“Due to the legislation I authored, the stays of Fernando V. Cota, a convicted rapist and alleged serial assassin, have been disinterred from Fort Sam Houston Nationwide Cemetery in San Antonio,” Cornyn mentioned in a press launch. “I recognize Secretary Collins and the VA for swiftly executing the legislation to deliver closure to the victims’ households and restore honor amongst our nation’s heroes on the sacred burial grounds of Fort Sam Houston.”
In response to federal legislation 38 U.S. Code § 2411, the internment or memorialization of veterans who dedicated heinous crimes via the Nationwide Cemetery Administration or Arlington Nationwide Cemetery is prohibited, nonetheless the legislation was not adopted till 1984, shortly after Cota’s dying.
Cota isn’t the primary veteran to have his stays faraway from a nationwide cemetery. In 2023, former Lt. Andrew Chabrol’s stays had been disinterred from Arlington Nationwide Cemetery. Chabrol, a Navy officer, was convicted of the 1991 homicide of Petty Officer Second Class Melissa Harrington. He was executed in Virginia in 1993.
Silka, an Army veteran, was killed in a firefight with Alaska State Troopers in 1984. He had been on the run after killing 9 individuals in a distant Alaskan village two days earlier. At his father’s request, Silka’s ashes had been interred in a nationwide cemetery in Sitka, Alaska, however there’s been momentum lately to have his stays disinterred.
Cota’s Violent Previous
Born in 1946, Cota was drafted into the Army within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, serving within the Vietnam Warfare.
In 1984, he died by suicide after being pulled over by police alongside a California freeway and was buried at Fort Sam Houston Nationwide Cemetery. Investigators imagine Cota took his personal life to spare him from a lifetime in jail or the dying penalty.
He had already hung out behind bars, convicted of attacking, bounding and raping a nurse in 1975. Whereas he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, Cota was launched on parole in 1983.
Following his dying, detectives linked Cota to extra sexual assaults and recognized him as the primary suspect within the murders of six younger ladies in San Jose, California.
Scoping out the again of his van, police found a younger girl’s corpse, the physique of Kim Marie Dunham, 21. She had been reported lacking a day earlier. A search of his house would result in extra ghastly findings. Police discovered a small closet that seemed to be a torture chamber. The closet’s partitions had been coated in fingerprints, which had been collected for examination to hopefully determine Cota’s different alleged victims.
Discovering the weird closet was solely the tip of the iceberg.
Police found false ID playing cards, a bogus police badge, a number of ladies’s blouses, six pairs of girls’s footwear, and adverts Cota produced and distributed across the San Jose State College Campus, hoping to draw college students to stay in his residence.
Investigators decided Cota doubtless murdered the six ladies by strangulation, stabbing or savage beatings.
