The Votes Are In!
2023 Readers' Choice is back, bigger and better than ever!
View Winners → 
Crime Sep 09, 2022
| Photo courtesy of Scott Rodgerson/Unsplash
by
share with
By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
A prosecutor told jurors Friday that the evidence was overwhelming that a man murdered a Pomona SWAT officer who was helping to serve a search warrant at the San Gabriel house where the defendant and his family lived, while the defense attorney urged jurors to acquit his client, whom he argued acted in self-defense without realizing it was police who were outside the home.
The downtown Los Angeles jury — which is due back in court Monday morning — deliberated for about an hour after being handed the case late Friday against David Martinez, who is facing second-degree murder and assault with a firearm on a police officer in connection with the Oct. 28, 2014 shooting of Officer Shaun Diamond.
The 45-year-old officer was placed on life support and died a day after the bullet severed his spine and shattered his lower jaw.
Jurors in Martinez’s first trial acquitted him of first-degree murder in June 2019 after nearly five days of deliberations, but deadlocked on the lesser charge of second-degree murder involving the death of the 16-year law enforcement veteran who had also worked for the Los Angeles and Montebello police departments. The first jury did not vote on the assault charge.
Martinez, now 44, surrendered to police shortly after the shooting, telling officers, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were the police. I thought you were the Mongols.”
In the prosecution’s final argument, Deputy District Attorney Hilary Williams urged jurors to hold Martinez — a Mongols member at the time — responsible for his actions.
“The evidence in this case overwhelmingly supports that this man is guilty of murder,” the prosecutor said.
Williams told the panel that it was “irrational on every level” to shoot a law enforcement officer in front of some of the defendant’s own family members, but said that he was “high on methamphetamine” at the time of the shooting.
Diamond had turned his back to walk off the steps with a heavy piece of equipment that had been used to open the screen door and was shot by Martinez in the back of the neck with a 12-gauge shotgun, the prosecutor told jurors earlier during the trial. None of the officers returned fire, the prosecutor said.
“You don’t get to just shoot somebody on your doorstep,” the prosecutor told jurors, arguing that there was no way the shooting occurred in self-defense as Martinez and his attorney contend.
Martinez’s attorney, Brady Sullivan, called what happened a “tragic accident” and said Martinez was lawfully defending his family after seeing the barrel of a gun.
“And it was reasonable … The law says it’s reasonable to defend your family, your home and yourself,” the defense lawyer told the panel.
Martinez’s lawyer said it was not reasonable to believe that Martinez would deliberately fire a shot at police and put his entire family at risk inside the home.
“He didn’t know it’s the police. He thinks it’s an intruder,” Sullivan said.
The defense attorney — who called the SWAT team’s operation that day “completely unnecessary” — contended that the SWAT officers’ warnings that they were there to serve a search warrant were drowned out by noise being made by the SWAT team as they tried to get into the house and a locked gate, while the prosecutor said the warnings were given before and during the efforts to breach the home and gate.
Martinez testified in his own defense during both trials, saying during his first trial that he fired a “warning shot” from his shotgun because he feared members of the Mongols were trying to break into the home he shared with his parents, his girlfriend, their two young children and his adult sister.
The defendant told jurors that he was startled to hear screaming after firing the gunshot, turned around, dropped the shotgun, laid down and said he was sorry.
“I kept saying I was sorry. I didn’t know it was the police,” Martinez testified in 2019. “I thought it was the Mongols. I would never fire at police or law enforcement ever. I have family that’s (in) law enforcement.”
He maintained during his first trial that he “shot to protect my family” and that there was “no target.”
Police went to the house early that morning to serve a search warrant in connection with an ongoing investigation by a task force into the Mongols motorcycle club, the prosecutor told jurors in her opening statement.
More from Crime
