A grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict a federal immigration agent who killed a man accused of striking an agent with his car in Texas last March, a shooting death not disclosed by Department of Homeland Security for nearly a year.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz released a statement shared with local media saying that a grand jury had declined to charge anyone in the case. A DHS spokeswoman said the a grand jury had “unanimously found no criminality.”
The involvement of a federal agent in the death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was only revealed this month, when American Oversight — a nonprofit watchdog group — published federal documents obtained via public records request. Martinez is the third U.S. citizen known to have been fatally shot by DHS personnel since President Donald Trump launched an aggressive immigration crackdown in January. The other two are Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed days apart in January while monitoring and protesting immigration enforcement activity.
Martinez was killed on March 15 in South Padre Island, where Homeland Security Investigations personnel were conducting immigration enforcement with local police. During that effort, officers and agents responded to a major vehicle accident in a commercial area populated with bars and beachwear stores. The internal documents said Martinez declined instructions to stop his vehicle while approaching a roadblock and struck a Homeland Security Investigations agent, “who wound up on the hood of the vehicle.”
An agent then fatally shot Martinez through the open driver’s side window, the documents say.
A witness to the shooting, Joshua Orta, 25, disputed the government’s version of events in a written statement provided to lawyers for Martinez’s mother, Rachel Reyes. Martinez was given conflicting instructions from multiple law enforcement officers, Orta wrote, and never struck an agent.
Orta, who was a lifelong friend of Martinez, was riding in the passenger seat when Martinez was killed. He had been planning to participate in the family’s legal fight for transparency and civil compensation, lawyers for Martinez’s mother said, but was killed over the weekend in an unrelated, fiery vehicle crash in San Antonio.
The South Padre Island Police Department, whose officers are equipped with body cameras, has declined to make public video evidence of the shooting, citing an ongoing investigation into the shooting by the Texas Department of Public Safety. That investigation is likely ended as a result of the grand jury decision, attorneys for Martinez’s mother said, adding that they expect to soon have an opportunity to review the footage.
Charles M. Stam, a Houston-based attorney representing Martinez’s mother, said he did not have high expectations for a grand jury but remained disappointed.
“We believe that it is essential now that the Texas Department of Public Safety publicly disclose the full findings of their investigation, so that Ruben’s family and the public can determine for themselves whether ICE’s story is accurate and why Ruben was killed that night,” Stam and his co-counsel Alex Stamm and Butch Hayes said in a statement Wednesday evening. “We have sought that information, and we will continue to do so. … Today’s event changes nothing.”
Douglas MacMillan contributed to this report.
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