A district judge ordered Faustin Martinez to be held without bail pending trial in a case where he allegedly burned down his father’s house, then stole a fire pickup truck and led police on a chase before crashing.
Martinez, 20, of Medanales, was ordered to be held without bail on Aug. 1, following a combined detention and preliminary hearing in Tierra Amarilla.
District Judge Anastasia Martin filed the order granting his detention three days later.
The same day as the Aug. 1 hearing, someone, presumably his defense attorney, filed a motion for a psychiatric and diagnostic evaluation. The motion is sealed and no order appears in the court record granting it. However, when a defendant’s competency is questioned, it usually puts cases on pause until competency is determined. The last time Martinez’s prosecutors tried to hold him as a danger to the community, his competency was also questioned.
While the hearing on Aug. 1 was to see if Martinez will be held without bail and to see what charges should be bound over to District Court, the case has not been bound over and no future hearings have been set.
Currently, Martinez is charged with two counts of aggravated assault on an officer and one count each of aggravated assault on a healthcare worker, aggravated fleeing an officer, unlawful taking of a vehicle and negligent arson.
Martin wrote in her order holding Martinez without bail that the evidence shows Martinez allegedly burned down the house he shared with his dad, fled the scene, threw a rock at a responding firefighter, fled from law enforcement after driving over spike trips and stopped after hitting a law enforcement vehicle.
“These are acts of domestic violence and violence against law enforcement,” she wrote.
The evidence against Martinez is “strong” including multiple eyewitnesses and Martinez allegedly “made several admissions.”
The cause of the fire is undetermined, according to the fire marshal’s report, she wrote.
“The Defendant’s criminal history contains multiple prior allegations of violence and fleeing from officers, including an incident involving the Defendant discharging a firearm,” she wrote. “This history weighs in favor of detention.”
Martin wrote that Martinez’s defense attorney was correct in pointing out that Martinez hasn’t been charged with anything in the year prior.
“However, the Defendant is not yet 21, and in the last 2 years has been charged with 6 felonies, during which the Defendant failed to appear 3 times,” she wrote.
She wrote his “extreme fleeing” from law enforcement in the stolen truck shows he is likely to commit a new crime if released.
Martin wrote that she did not consider putting him on house arrest with a GPS monitor as a viable option because “there is nothing before this Court indicating where the Defendant may be able to reside while on EM-House Arrest.”
Prosecutors previously tried to have Martinez held without bail pending trial in 2024, after he was accused of shooting his brother in the face. The bullet went through his brother’s eye and was lodged in his head. His brother survived the shooting, which Martinez alternately claimed as accidental and done by someone else.
District Judge Jason Lidyard dismissed that shooting case following a preliminary hearing where he found there was not probable cause to support the charge. Probable cause is defined by the Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute as “a reasonable basis for believing that a crime may have been committed.” That preliminary hearing was delayed as Martinez’s competency was questioned.
Fire, theft, crash
Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Deputy Patrick Martinez wrote in a statement of probable cause for Faustin Martinez Jr.’s arrest that a firefighter on his way to the house fire stopped on the side of the road, because he saw Faustin Martinez Jr. and another man on the ground. Faustin Martinez Jr. allegedly threw a rock at him and then stole the truck, leading to a chase, he wrote.
When the truck reached traffic that was backed up because of construction on the highway, it turned around and Deputy Andrew Varbel hit the rear of the truck with his patrol car. However, the truck continued until it went head-on with another deputy’s patrol car and continued driving until it went off the road and got stuck in the dirt, Patrick Martinez wrote.
At the scene of the fire, Patrick Martinez wrote he spoke to Faustin Martinez Sr., who said his son told him he burned his house down, no one else was home and that his neighbor called him and told him about the fire. When he located his son on the highway, he confronted him. His son threw a rock at him and told him, “I burned your house, you killed my mom,” Patrick Martinez wrote.
The neighbor, Fidel Serrano, told deputies he saw the fire when it first started, tried to put it out with a fire extinguisher, but that didn’t work as the “flames took the house very quickly” and that he saw a person fleeing the scene in a black shirt. Shoe impressions from the scene matched Faustin Martinez Jr.’s shoes.