Update 11:00 a.m. Clarified that Martinez was not, in fact, a current student, but a former one.
A party of a few dozen turned tragic last Friday night as a few party-goers, some of them Colorado Mesa University (CMU) students, sustained gunshot wounds.
Three were hospitalized. One of them, Jared Martinez, 22, died at the scene. According to Student Services, his last term of enrollment at CMU was Fall 2019.
The party was a normal occurrence for weekend nights; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It started around 11:00 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 19, with the shooting occurring at 12:17 a.m., just into Saturday.
“So we were just there hanging out. And then about 10 to 15 guys walked into the house,” roommate and friend of Martinez, Michael Solis, 23, said. “They definitely looked a little sketchy. It’s kind of weird, you know, and the house owner started kicking people out including them, just saying ‘if you guys don’t know the house owners you guys got to leave the house,’ because they just didn’t want random people there.”
Solis recently graduated from CMU.
The party was only going on for an hour or so, and happened around the 1000 block on Teller Avenue. Solis and his friends, including Roberto Amaro, 21, knew the homeowners, and weren’t kicked out, but some of them decided to leave anyway.
“So, out of our group, it was like five or like four of us that left. But three of us had stayed there, including Jared and two others that got shot that night,” Solis said.
Both Solis and Amaro had left the party before the shooting occurred.
“We got a call because our one buddy did get shot in the chest. They just told us they were bleeding,” Amaro said. “I don’t know because I stayed in the car, and my buddies come back and they’re just freaking out and they tell me that people got shot – we didn’t know who it was and they’re saying we couldn’t find Jared.”
They would later go to the hospital, though updates were sparse.
“I was at home and my friend was with me and one of his friends had called him – they had been there,” friend and roommate of Martinez, Braylin Lee, 23, said. “And they immediately got up and left my house, and then we kind of all talked about it, and knowing that my roommate was involved, everyone was kind of talking to me about it.”
“By the time we got back there were over 10 cops there,” Solis said. “And everyone in the house was on their knees, and with their hands behind their back so they were all being detained, you know, and we had no idea what had happened.”
Solis didn’t know that a shooting had happened – he thought it might have been a fight or something else.
“We saw the cops there and we started asking questions to see what happened,” Solis said. “And by the time we knew it, we heard there was a shooting. But we hadn’t we didn’t know who we added who had gotten shot. And then we found out everything throughout the night.”
Lee didn’t find out about Martinez’s death until he read the statement CMU sent via email a few hours later into the night, at 4:32 a.m.
“I read the news article that the school had sent out with that email. And I figured since he had been the only one that had not come home, that it was him,” Lee said.
“We knew he was in [the hospital] shot, but I just wasn’t trying to think. Like I was just like, ‘we’re gonna be hearing about this in like two weeks..,’ I was trying to keep positive, you know,” Amaro said.
Amaro spent the night at the house where Solis and Lee live.
“I couldn’t sleep, […] I only slept an hour or two and I woke up,” Amaro said. “And then I don’t know the time I got up, [but] just everybody looked at me, and you just knew.”
Martinez had been studying business at the university, and had a great deal of interest in stocks, trading and finance. He wanted to be the owner of his own business someday.
According to the Grand Junction Police Department, on Feb. 22, Fruita resident Israel Isaiah Maestas-Reza, 18, was arrested by Grand Junction police. While he had already been detained at the Grand Mesa Youth Services Center on unrelated charges, police had continued to investigate Martinez’s death, and arrested Maestas-Reza in connection with the fatal shooting.
He is currently at the Mesa County Detention Facility facing multiple charges, including first-degree murder, second degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm, among others.
