A man on trial for a 2020 Longmont murder pumped 12 rounds into a car and killed 34-year-old Matthew Bond, a friendly man with little or no connection to the fatal shooting, prosecutors said Friday.
They told jurors in closing arguments that 35-year-old Richard Lawrence Martinez wanted instead to kill Seth Eberly for threatening his common-law-wife with a shotgun a few hours before Bond’s murder on June 3, 2020.
Martinez saw Eberly try to pull out of the cul-de-sac at the 1200 block of Hunter Court about 4:30 a.m., and approached the Elberly’s car with a pistol in his hand and started shooting, Boulder Deputy District Attorney Michelle Sudano told jurors. Some of the bullets actually hit Bond —Eberly’s friend and a passenger in the car —killing him at the scene.
“The defendant was so hell-bent on getting revenge on Seth Eberly, that he indiscriminately shot into this vehicle,” Sudano said. “He took those shots into the car without caring if there was anybody else in that car.”
“Matthew Bond,” Sudano said, “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The jury was handed the case against Martinez late Friday afternoon after a week of testimony. Martinez did not testify in his own defense and the defense called no other witnesses. The jury will start deliberations Monday morning.
Martinez is charged with first-degree murder after deliberation, first-degree murder extreme indifference, attempted first-degree murder after delibration and attempted first-degree murder extreme indifference. There are also four crimes of violence sentence enhancers.
Jurors were told by Boulder District Judge Norma Sierra that if they could not convict Martinez on the first-degree murder charges, they could consider convicting him on lesser crimes of second-degree murder, criminally negligent homicide and reckless manslaughter.
Defense attorney Eric Zale said the shooting was self-defense and Martinez was terrified of Eberly after he threatened Martinez’s wife with the shotgun. Martinez, who had secured the gun from a friend, only approached Eberly at Hunter Court for a talk.
Eberly tried to run him over with his car and Martinez fired only to protect himself. Martinez ran to his grandmother who encouraged him to turn himself in, Zale told jurors. But he ran from police and was eventually caught in New Mexico, because he believed he could not trust the authorities, Zale told jurors.
“Richard Martinez lives in a world that may be foreign to many of us,” Zale told the jury. “Richard Martinez lives in a world that in all honesty we may not want to exist. Richard Martinez lives in a world where there is no outside help, there is no protection from law enforcement. It's a world of drugs, it's a world of guns.”
Boulder Chief Trial Deputy District Attorney Fred Johnson scoffed at Zale’s assessment of how Martinez handled the shooting.
“Mr. Martinez doesn’t live in a foreign world, he lives in Longmont, Colorado,” Johnson told jurors. “He may wish he lived in that world, but he lives in Longmont, Colorado, where he shot and murdered a young man who had nothing to do with his beef.”
