It’s a cold evening as students and community members alike huddle at the Center for Reflection, pictures of Jared Martinez adorning the brick walls. Candles are passed out, but they aren’t able to be lit because of the wind. It’s a quiet night during his vigil.
Martinez, a student that had attended Colorado Mesa University (CMU) before, was killed during a shooting that occurred Feb. 20, on Teller Avenue. He was 22 years old.
“Jared was, I want to say boy, but he really wasn’t a boy. He was a man who had one of the biggest hearts you ever met; he cared about people, he cared about anybody in his life, whether they had met him a few hours ago or a few years ago,” Kate Carei-Eakins, aunt of Martinez, said.
Martinez originally came to Grand Junction to clear his head from the death of his mother, Sally Carei-Martinez, which happened back in high school. After falling in love with the area, he decided to enroll at CMU, hoping to get a degree in business.
“He wanted to be a small businessman like a lot of people in his family,” Joe Carei, uncle of Martinez, said. “His father was a small businessman, I am, his uncle is so that was kind of what he was looking at.”
That drive for business led him to meet many of the people who would become his friends during his time at the university.
“Jared was just a good, good kid, who just wanted the best for everyone,” Michael Solis said. “He was just really genuine and really pure hearted. He loved his family, and he loved all his friends.”
Solis, 23, and Braylin Lee, 23, were two of Martinez’s roommates and good friends. Solis recently graduated from CMU with a business degree.
“Every morning he was waking up to check the stocks and he would always inform me on stuff that was going on, and what he thought about it, and what he thinks I should do in the stock market personally,” Lee said.
Martinez was right there when the GameStop and Wall Street Bets Reddit fiasco went down.
“Oh yeah, most definitely,” Lee said when asked if Martinez was following those events. “He thought it was crazy how someone could just kind of say stuff on Discord.”
“He was always telling me when we do it, like if I fucked up in school or whatever, that he would just put me on whatever he decided to do,” good friend of Martinez Roberto Amaro said.
Amaro met Martinez during their freshman year at Mesa, when they both lived in Garfield Hall. They’d talk about anything together – “Life, girls, what we wanted in the future, he always had ideas.”
Martinez was born in Bordentown, New Jersey. Growing up, he started wrestling at the age of five; it was one of his biggest passions. Attending high school in both Bordentown and Miami, he wrestled, ran track and played soccer. He didn’t wrestle for CMU, wanting to focus on his studies.
“One of the very last [memories] before he passed, we went snowboarding together,” Solis said. “And he actually broke his collarbone while we were up there.”
Happening just a few weeks before the shooting, Martinez had no idea anything was broken. They went back up the lift one more time, and got down the entire mountain.
“After that, he went to my truck and we took him back down the mountain, and he went to the hospital and that’s when they told him he had a broken collarbone,” Solis said. “So the entire time, he was riding with a broken bone, and he’s a strong kid overall man, just really strong.”
“At this particular moment, I remember his smile. It was a little impish at times,” Carei-Eakins said.
“I just want to let it be known that he had a pure heart, and he was just there for everybody,” Amaro said.
Martinez is survived by his father, Augustine Martinez, his two siblings, Samantha and Liam, and his grandmother Piedad Robertson.
