The Texas Department of Public Safety late Friday quietly released body camera and security footage from a case in which federal immigration officers in South Padre Island last year shot and killed a 23-year-old San Antonio man. The video shows him driving slowly past officers stopping traffic, and at times interacting with them while his brake lights are on, before gunshots suddenly ring out.
The clips, which were reviewed by The Texas Tribune, do not show Ruben Ray Martinez hitting the Department of Homeland Security Investigations agent with his car, as the agency has repeatedly claimed. But they also do not provide clear evidence that he did not. The footage is from multiple vantage points and doesn’t show everything – in some cases, key audio is missing. The federal agent in question was not wearing a body camera.
In a video showing DPS officers questioning 25-year-old Joshua Orta, the passenger in Martinez’s car during the shooting, Orta says that he saw an officer leaning on the hood of the car, but he did not believe Martinez hit the officer or intended to do so. Orta later dictated an unsigned statement to attorneys after the incident that said the officer “slapped the hood” of the vehicle.
Lawyers for Martinez’s family argued that the footage and related documents don’t support the administration’s assertion that he didn’t follow their commands and then accelerated, hitting one of its agents and therefore necessitating lethal force.
“This batch of evidence shows no justification for Ruben’s killing,” said Charles Stam and Alex Stamm, attorneys for Martinez’s mother, in a joint statement. “We, and the public, have yet to see all of the evidence held by the government.”
Martinez was shot multiple times last March in the first known instance of DHS agents killing an American citizen during the second Trump administration, which has spurred Democratic lawmakers’ push for further accountability. The incident remained unknown until last month when American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, released hundreds of pages related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of force that the organization had obtained in a lawsuit.
South Padre Island Police had initially only put out a press release on Martinez’s death, but did not identify the agency responsible for the incident. Public records’ requests did not immediately reveal the federal agency’s involvement. A two-sentence police report described Martinez striking a federal agent with his car, but did not mention the shooting.
Martinez was in South Padre Island celebrating his birthday with friends, according to a spokesperson for Rachel Reyes, Martinez’s mother, and her lawyers. A self-proclaimed Trump supporter, Reyes has called for an end to “abuse and impunity” among law enforcement since federal agents’ role in her son’s death has come to light.
His death last year occurred months before public outrage and protest over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, who were both shot by federal immigration agents. One of those killed, Minneapolis resident 37-year-old Renee Good, was accused by federal officials of attempting to run over an agent before being fatally shot in her car. Body camera footage obtained by media outlets has contradicted ICE’s version of events in her case.
The body camera footage released by DPS’ Texas Rangers late Friday, and separately shared by Martinez’s lawyers, show a crowded scene in which multiple drivers coming across an unrelated accident in the busy island vacation spot’s main thoroughfare were confused on how to respond. According to the DPS report released Friday, federal agents were also present to help with security and traffic control, which is common in this border community 30 miles from Mexico. Officers yelled at many of the approaching drivers, aggressively demanding that they redirect from the accident while drivers seemed unclear on how to navigate away from it safely on the island’s primary road.
By the time Martinez arrived, after his lawyers said he had “a few drinks” and had been at a party and then to Whataburger, footage shows him driving slowly toward the intersection in a blue Ford Fusion. He stops away from the intersection and appears to speak with one officer. His car then creeps forward while an officer points in the direction that he is driving. The footage shows that his brake lights are on and he is slowing down as he reaches the intersection. He appears to come to a full stop once more, waiting for pedestrians to cross, before making a right turn.
In contrast, a DHS spokesperson has claimed that Martinez “intentionally ran over” a federal agent before another officer shot and killed him
Another body camera from a different vantage point shows the blue car driven by Martinez after it stops and before he makes the turn. One officer can be heard saying, “stop him, stop him,” appearing to run after the vehicle. Another officer says “get him out.” A separate body camera reveals an officer yelling, “where’s he going?”
Footage, alongside reports by officers, show that a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden told another sergeant that Martinez had a bottle of Crown Royal, a Canadian whiskey, inside his car. An unidentified person in the video said to “keep going” before one warden yelled to another officer to stop Martinez from driving forward. According to footage and law enforcement reports, Martinez drove into the intersection. Officers began running toward Martinez’s car.
“Out of the vehicle now,” one yelled.
Seconds later, at about 11:42 p.m., gunshots ring out as bystanders are seen fleeing.
That is followed by officers yelling, “shots fired.”
Officers are seen dragging Martinez, wearing black Adidas pants, out of the car onto the pavement. They handcuff the man as he lays on the ground, barely moving. Paramedics later load Martinez onto a stretcher, with one officer calling an ambulance and another confirming “an exit wound.” He was transported to a local hospital in Brownsville, where he later died. A toxicology report and autopsy of Martinez detected alcohol, marijuana and alprazolam, a prescription medication for anxiety, according to the records.
“HSI is fine,” one officer said after the shooting, according to the footage. “That guy, they transported him.”
Another officer adds, “HSI tried to stop him.”
Footage also shows officers handcuffing Orta, Martinez’s friend and passenger, who died in an unrelated car crash in San Antonio in late February before he could sign his affidavit. Orta’s family has said he was deeply troubled by what occurred that day.
The night of the shooting, a DPS officer who questioned Orta suggested that Martinez should have responded to officers yelling “a pretty simple command” to stop, and that his car could have been used to kill or seriously injure someone. Orta denied that Martinez’s car struck the officer.
“I saw the officer kind of like, get on the hood,” Orta said during questioning. “Like he didn’t hit him, but, it kind of like — you know what I mean, caught his feet.”
“[Martinez] didn’t know what to do, he definitely didn’t want to go to jail, but, as far as running over an officer, endangering, he wouldn’t do that,” Orta later added during questioning.
At the end of the questioning, Orta asked one officer: “You felt like it was necessary to use lethal force?”
Orta’s unsigned affidavit, provided by a spokesperson for Martinez’s family, more explicitly pushed back against officials’ narrative about how events unfolded. The affidavit stated Martinez never accelerated toward officers, never acted in a threatening manner and that officers “could have easily stepped aside.”
A written statement sent to DPS from Jack Stevens, the HSI agent who shot Martinez, said he believed that the man looking past officers with clenched hands on the steering wheel was a “pre attack indicator” and that Stevens was afraid of “numerous casualties” before firing.
Stevens could not immediately be reached for comment. Spokespeople for DHS and ICE did not respond to questions about the new footage late Friday. A spokesperson for DPS, which oversees the Texas Rangers, also did not respond.
But in the agency’s report released alongside the footage, investigators described a federal agent shouting to Martinez to stop the car before the agent “ultimately discharged his handgun toward the driver for not stopping.” The report describes Martinez’s car as “slowly driving forward” when he was shot.
The report also included interviews with several officials at the scene, including Stevens and another HSI agent who approached the vehicle. The other agent claimed Martinez’s car “bumped his legs” after he was ordered to halt, and that he fell over the car’s hood as the car made a turn.
None of that is visible in the available footage.
Footage from a body camera captured after the shooting showed an officer describing the scene to South Padre Island police chief Claudine O’Carroll. The officer told the chief that Martinez had “stepped on it” after being told to stop and was “on top of agents in front” of the car before shots were fired.
Lawyers for Martinez argued in a statement to the Tribune that the footage shows his car was “barely moving when he was shot. That he was braking, not accelerating. That nobody was on the hood of his car. That nobody was in front of his car when he was shot. That he was shot at point-blank range through his side window by an ICE agent who was in no danger.”
After ICE’s involvement in Martinez’s death was made public last month, a Cameron County grand jury ruled that it did not find probable cause to issue a criminal indictment related to the shooting. While prosecutors can pursue a case after such a decision by a grand jury, they rarely do.
In an interview with CBS News this week, Martinez’s mother who has mostly remained silent over the past year, said that she still does not believe DHS’ version of what occurred.
“He was not a violent person,” she said of her son. “He was not aggressive.”
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