Man dies after high-speed chase, teen driver still missing,
sought by police
Gilroy – The screams still haunt Victoria Lara. Settling into bed, she heard the crash before she saw it: a fanfare of sirens, a thunderous bang, and then, “the ugly noise.”
“The way he was moaning,” she said, “I knew he wouldn’t make it.”
A high-speed police chase came to a violent end Friday night with the death of 25-year-old Rudy Martinez III. The driver, an unidentified teen, sprinted away from the wreckage, abandoning Martinez in the crumpled blue Nissan.
Police tried to stop the car near the intersection of Monterey and Fifth streets, where the driver had made an improper left-hand turn just after 9pm. The Nissan barreled on, and a chase ensued. Jetting at 55 miles per hour, the teen led police down Eigleberry, First and Church streets before hitting an oncoming van, just south of Ronan Street. Neighbors say the car flipped; both passenger sides collided. When police arrived, seconds later, the teen was scaling a fence, and Martinez was howling in pain.
Dogs sniffed through yard after yard, seeking the teen, who’d shed a sweatshirt before dashing south. Police have identified a suspect, but declined to release his name. As of press time, he had yet to be found.
Neighbors swarmed to the scene, gaping at a dozen police cars and the deafening helicopter, which descended to airlift Martinez to a San Jose trauma center. Two women, sobbing, stepped out of their damaged van, uninjured but shaken.
“It was like the Fourth of July,” said neighbor Lourdes Ortiz, who had just taken her 2-year-old granddaughter out of the bath when the cars collided, and she rushed to the door. “Not even like the Fourth of July – [the street] was even more packed.”
Paramedics labored long to remove Martinez from the wreck, but to no avail: the man died en route to the trauma center.
The mangled Nissan Altima was recently stolen from San Jose. The teen driver is still on the run, and could face charges ranging from fleeing police to homicide, if police track him down.
“We’ve got leads,” said Sgt. Kurt Svardal, “and we’re following up on them.”
Monday, the crash had long since been cleared, but neon orange paint punctuated the pavement, marking out the tragedy. A red mylar balloon wobbled in the breeze above a small memorial. From a photograph, Martinez smiled ever-so-slightly, straddling a red bike. Beside him, Jesus raised his arms about a glass-bound candle.
“On the outside, he was a big grizzly bear,” said Rudy’s brother, Frank Martinez. “But on the inside, he was soft. Like a rabbit.”
At Frank Martinez’ Gilroy apartment, the family gathered. Eric and Victoria Diaz, Martinez’ parents, have since moved to San Jose, where Martinez lived with them. But the family is deeply rooted in Gilroy, where great-grandparents arrived at the turn of the century.
Martinez was born at Wieder Hospital, now defunct; at age 2, he found his first turtle, at Christmas Hill Park. Eric Diaz dubs him “an uncertified herpetologist,” delighted by snakes, scorpions, lizards and turtles. The family basement was “half a zoo,” Victoria Diaz remembers, and when it got messy, she’d threaten to give those lizards back to the pet shop. They nicknamed him ‘Gordies’: chubby one.
Even as an adult, he gravitated toward nature, toward fishing and camping. In the 11th grade he quit school and took up work as a landscaper – for the joy of being among green, living things, his family said. He left school to provide for his children, 10-year-old Angel, in Salinas, and 6-year-old Isaiah, in Fresno, and scraped for time off to visit them.
The oldest of seven siblings, he was their anchor, Eric Diaz recalled. When a car needed fixing, a fence mending, he would do it. Weeks ago, he bought Frank a Christmas tree; Frank called him “Robin Hood.” Victoria Diaz treasures the message he left on her answering machine, hours before his death: “Tell Dad I love him, and I’ll call you guys in a little bit,” he said.
Diaz called the unidentified teen “a friend of a friend.” No real friend, he said, would strand his son, bleeding and gasping for life.
“He hit, he ran, and he left my son dead,” said Victoria Diaz. “He should already be locked up.”
