Shadowy, Boozy World of Illegal Alien Ends in Deadly Encounter

The beers were flowing out behind the carwash, peeling away the boredom for Tony Martinez and his companions.

Manny Lopez had a job at the place, and he and Martinez would sometimes gather there with other buddies on warm summer evenings after quitting time to shoot the breeze and toss back a few cold ones. Sometimes they downed a lot of cold ones.

On July 12, music drifted from a radio in the cramped storage room where Lopez spent nights on a thin mattress atop a makeshift plywood cot. The four young men stood on the asphalt parking lot that Saturday night, talking of work in the fields and packing sheds, and trading stories of their native Guatemala. By 11 o’clock, four six-packs were gone.

It hadn’t been a very good couple of months for Martinez. The 18-year-old’s landlady had booted him out a few weeks earlier when she became fed up with his drinking binges. Moreover, there had been the inevitable run-ins with agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Not long after the men bought four fresh six-packs, a sheriff’s patrol car pulled up. It had been called to the scene by a neighbor who was suspicious of the men loitering at the carwash so late at night. Martinez and Lopez, in back of the faded-blue building, failed to spot the squad car quickly enough. Their friends did, however, and high-tailed it to safety up a steep dirt embankment. When a lone deputy came around the corner of the building, Martinez stole into the storage room, closing the door behind him.

Lopez had no easy hiding place and the deputy quickly collared him, figuring he had snagged a burglar. A second sheriff’s car arrived and, after the two deputies handcuffed Lopez, they set out to track down Martinez.

In the back of the patrol car in which he had been placed, Lopez waited, then watched as an ambulance roared up to the carwash, red lights spinning. Martinez had been hurt, he thought. It was only later, in jail, that he learned differently.

When a deputy pulled open the door to Martinez’s hiding place, authorities said, the young Guatemalan had burst out toward the law officer. Martinez, who was unarmed, was killed by a bullet to the chest.

Outside a small circle of friends and acquaintances in Fallbrook, not many people took notice of the death of Tony Martinez. The press and television news virtually ignored the incident in the days after the shooting.

Like tens of thousands of illegal aliens in San Diego County, Martinez lived a shadow life, and the anonymity of that existence seemed to march in step with him to the grave.

This is the story of Martinez’s life and the calamitous moments that ended it.

Juan Antonio Martinez left his family in San Pedro Soloma, a town in western Guatemala, and came to the United States at the age of 15. He was short and skinny, little more than a boy.

Friends recall that he never talked much about his reasons for heading north at such an early age, but they mention--aside from the economic allure--that there may have been trouble with his parents. Others speculate that the youth may have been worried about being drafted into the military.

Martinez found his way to Fallbrook, a small farming community set amid the grassy, rolling hills on the southeastern edge of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base.

For a young man like him, the town seemed a hospitable place compared to the urban sprawl of San Diego or Los Angeles. Jobs for unskilled laborers are plentiful in the citrus and avocado fields. Moreover, most of the hamlet’s residents hold a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward the undocumented aliens who form the backbone of the area’s agricultural work force.

Gradually, the shy, slight teen-ager carved out a life for himself. Like most workers from south of the border, Martinez landed jobs in the groves and at a packing shed, sorting fruit into crates. Later, he found work in an upholstery shop and at an auto repair business. He also developed a cadre of friends, many of them fellow Guatemalans who enjoyed trading memories and reviving images of their native land.

Eager to assimilate, Martinez enrolled in an English extension program conducted in Fallbrook by a local community college, eventually developing a respectable grasp of the language.

Home was a small room in a modest stucco house set off a quiet cul-de-sac on the west side of town. Martinez rented the quarters from Chris Delallave, a mother of four who was struggling to make ends meet.

Delallave described Martinez as a friendly, likable young man who sometimes treated her young children to ice cream or escorted them to the Del Mar Fair.

Juan Aguilar, one of Martinez’s closest friends, said the youth was a “very, very friendly” person.

“We were best friends,” said Aguilar, who knew Martinez for about three years. “I loved him like a brother.”

Friends say Martinez had no particular sweetheart, but like other young men his age had his share of crushes. He often spent spare money to buy nice trousers or a special shirt to wear on weekend evenings.

The owner of the auto repair shop where Martinez was employed at the time of his death said the young Guatemalan was an honest worker, someone he could trust to look after the shop in his absence. On occasion, the youth borrowed tools. He always returned them promptly.

“When I had him around here he was polite, he was courteous,” said the employer, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions from the INS. “I just felt sorry for him. Hell, he was honest.”

While happy in Fallbrook, the youth lived the uneasy existence of an illegal alien, dodging immigration authorities. His efforts occasionally failed. In the last few years, friends say, he was apprehended by INS agents more than half a dozen times.

But he was never gone long. By telling immigration authorities he was Mexican, Martinez was deported to Tijuana, Delallave said. He would invariably be back in Fallbrook within a day or two.

The journey was sometimes hazardous. His employer at the auto repair shop recalled that Martinez, while crossing back into the United States on foot a few months ago, was ambushed by border bandits and robbed of his money and possessions--even his shoes. Still, he made it back.

Martinez, who stood 5-foot-1 and weighed about 130 pounds, had in recent months developed an interest in karate and weightlifting. One acquaintance, Jose Garcia, remembers how Martinez purchased an exercise bench at a local swap meet to use in his workouts.

For a time, Martinez accompanied his landlady and her family to a local church, apparently showing a genuine interest in God. One employer recalled finding him reading the Bible. Sometimes, Martinez would say, “God bless you” upon receiving his pay, the man said.

“For a while there he was religious,” Delallave said. “His life was shaping up real nice. Then he just stopped.”

The trouble, friends agree, was alcohol. Martinez’s sunny disposition was quickly soured by the beer he consumed.

“He had a drinking problem,” Delallave said. “I told him when he first moved in I didn’t want anyone drunk around here. He was real good for awhile.”

But in recent months, Martinez’s thirst for alcohol seemed to grow stronger, some friends said. He increasingly turned to a few bottles of beer for a good time. But all it seemed to do was create problems.

Aguilar said he had had a falling-out with Martinez a few months before his death. Excessive drinking was forbidden where Aguilar lived, but Martinez would sometimes show up for a visit with a mind hazy from booze.

When Aguilar told Martinez the drinking would have to stop, his buddy “got mad and left.” Although they saw each other occasionally after the run-in, the friendship was never the same, Aguilar said.

“He would drink and fall asleep when he came over to my house,” Aguilar said. “He wasn’t a drunk but he liked to drink.”

Martinez’s boss at the auto repair shop suggested that the binges were like those of many young men his age, a bad habit he probably would have grown out of. But Martinez’s landlady maintains that the teen-ager became a changed person after downing a six-pack of beer.

“He just totally lost his thinking cap when he got drunk,” she said. “When he got drunk he was real rowdy and irrational. He’d verbally abuse you.”

After several warnings about the problem, Delallave finally evicted Martinez. The youth moved into a small trailer at the auto repair shop.

One day, however, he returned to Delallave’s house while she was away and, in a drunken rage, began threatening her children and other boarders. When Delallave returned after a frantic telephone call from her daughter, she found a window broken where Martinez had fallen through, cutting himself. The bleeding young man had fled.

“He really got off the track toward the end,” Delallave said. “I worried a lot about him coming back here and doing something in a rage. It just was going downhill fast.”

Ray Bachlor was awakened the night of July 12 by a commotion at the carwash across the street. Looking out the bedroom window of his apartment, which sits on the second floor of a cinder-block building that houses the auto tune-up shop he owns, Bachlor recalls seeing the shadowy figures of four men standing around the Pepsi machine, hitting it with their feet and hands.

They also were looking in the front window of the small building that serves as an office for the carwash. Bachlor could hear a clanging noise, metal striking metal, as if someone was trying to get into the cash register. He looked at the clock. It was 11:24 p.m., much too late for anyone to be working. He called the Sheriff’s Department.

Deputy Edwin Puett had come on duty less than half an hour earlier. A dispatcher reported a malicious mischief incident occuring at the carwash. It didn’t take long for the seven-year department veteran to drive the few short blocks from the Fallbrook substation to the carwash.

As the 32-year-old deputy told homicide investigators later, he pulled up to the carwash and saw one man with his arm stuck between the black, wrought-iron safety bars mounted across the office’s sliding-glass window. The window was open, Puett said, and it appeared that the man was rummaging through a cash register sitting next to the window.

When the man saw the deputy, he scampered off, along a dark, open stretch of pavement between the office and the building that houses the mechanized tunnel where cars are washed, authorities say. Puett gave chase, but he lost sight of the man in the darkness.

The deputy, however, came upon a second man behind the office. Suspecting he had just short-circuited a burglary attempt, Puett grabbed the young man. It was Lopez. As he did so, Puett said, he heard a noise coming from the back door of the building. It was Martinez struggling to find a hiding place.

His hands full with one suspect, Puett secured the door by closing a hasp and tying it shut with a short rope.

Puett radioed for reinforcements and Sgt. Clyde Kodadek arrived shortly afterward. After Lopez was safely stowed in one of the patrol cars, the two law officers searched the carwash tunnel, meeting at the back of the facility. Puett told the sergeant he apparently had a suspect shut in the back part of the office building.

According to homicide investigators, one of the deputies placed a flashlight on the ground, aiming the high-powered beam toward the doorway. After the two had positioned themselves, Puett untied the rope and, handgun drawn, pulled the door open.

Puett told investigators that he had taken several steps away from the doorway when Martinez, both hands held out front at waist level and rising upward, charged directly at him. Puett also told investigators of seeing a gleam--like reflected light--in the vicinity of the man’s hands.

Kodadek was unable to provide so vivid a description. The sergeant, who was off to one side, recalled seeing “a human form” bolt from the door toward Puett, but little else.

Puett fired a single shot. The bullet passed through Martinez’s left arm and entered his chest, striking a rib and shattering it. The bone fragments hit the young Guatemalan’s lungs and other vital organs.

When Puett and Kodadek approached Martinez, lying bleeding on the pavement, they realized he was unarmed, investigators said.

The deputy and sergeant called for an ambulance and applied first aid to the groaning, mortally wounded youth. An emergency medical team arrived in minutes from Fallbrook Hospital, which is about a block from the carwash. Doctors worked on Martinez, but he died less than an hour after the shooting.

Authorities asked Frank Baek, the carwash owner, if he wanted to file burglary charges against his employee, Lopez. Baek declined, explaining that Lopez and his friends sometimes would slide open the office window to use a phone installed on a wall next to the cash register.

Lopez told his boss that one of his drinking buddies, a Mexican known to his friends as Tony the Cholo, was doing just that when the sheriff’s deputy pulled up. Earlier, Lopez had argued with Tony the Cholo, telling him not to use the phone because several unexplained calls had been made to Mexico in the weeks before.

“The only trouble is they drink too much,” Baek said later. “That’s the trouble.”

Indeed, an autopsy performed on Martinez showed that he had been legally drunk--and well beyond. By law, a person is considered to be intoxicated when his blood-alcohol level reaches 0.10%. Martinez had a reading of 0.24%, the autopsy report revealed.

Puett, who could not be reached for comment by The Times, took several days off after the shooting. As is customary for law-enforcement officers involved in such an incident, the deputy was required to attend counseling sessions with a psychologist “to work things out” before returning to duty, said Lt. John Tenwolde, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman. Puett went back on the beat in Fallbrook on Aug. 2, he added.

In the meantime, the sheriff’s homicide investigators have concluded their probe of the incident and forwarded their report to the district attorney’s office, so investigators there can determine whether Puett’s actions were appropriate. Senior Sheriff’s Department officers say they are awaiting the conclusion of that review before determining if they will take further action.

Martinez’s friends were understandably upset, but few cast blame on the Sheriff’s Department. Some even said they could understand, given the department’s description of the events, how Puett had shot to defend himself.

Bachlor agreed, suggesting that perhaps the incident simply took on a terrible momentum all its own.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said a few days after the shooting. “Being illegal aliens, they ran regardless of whether they were in the right or in the wrong. They were scared. More scared than we would be under the circumstances.”

At a Mexican restaurant just outside downtown Fallbrook, the management began collecting donations soon after the shooting to help Martinez’s family pay to have his body shipped to Guatemala. About $50 was raised. The church that Martinez had once attended with his landlady also chipped in, raising $250.

A day after the shooting, friends sent a wire to Guatemala to inform Martinez’s family of his death. For a time, word was that his mother would be traveling north to pick up her son’s body, but the days ticked off and no one came.

The body lay for weeks at the county morgue, where authorities speculated that Martinez’s parents in Guatemala were having trouble cutting through the bureaucratic red tape or raising money to cover the costs of flying the body home.

The barriers were finally lifted last week with the help of the Guatemalan consulate. On Wednesday, a month after the shooting, Martinez’s body was picked up by a Los Angeles-based mortuary hired by the consulate. The body was tucked inside a simple, cloth-covered casket and placed aboard a flight heading toward Central America.

After three years in the United States, Juan Antonio Martinez was going home.

Times staff writer Armando Acuna contributed to this story.