It was still dark when a passerby came upon the body of 15-year-old Nahum Martinez in Wylie on the morning of March 31, 2012. The Wylie East High School student had been shot in the forehead at close range, his body inexpertly hidden across from twin monuments marking the entrance to the otherwise peaceful Meadows of Birmingham subdivision.
Details emerged over the next several hours as police took little time retracing the killers' poorly covered tracks. A gun and loaded clip were found in an open field a few yards away, which led investigators a couple of hundred yards further to a home on Oxford Drive. There, they found a spent shell casing atop a dresser.
Suspicion fell on two of Nahum's friends, both 14, with whom he'd been hanging out on Friday night. Police determined they had killed Nahum the night before using a gun taken from a locked cabinet at the Oxford Drive home. Then, instead of calling 911, they wrapped Nahum in a comforter, dropped from a second-story window, dragged him down the street, and tried to stuff his body in a drainage ditch near where it was ultimately found.
Then, they returned home and went to sleep.
There didn't seem to be any real reason why the 14-year-olds, who were tried as juveniles and so aren't being identified, shot their friend. Testimony at an early court hearing suggested there'd been a falling out over one of them flirting with Nahum's 17-year-old girlfriend, though the boy who pulled the trigger testified that the shooting was an accident.
Nevertheless, the teen, now 15, pleaded guilty Monday to manslaughter and tampering with evidence. Judge Cynthia Wheless sentenced him to 15 years in custody, the maximum allowed under the law. He will spend the next four years in youth detention, at which point there will be a hearing to determine if he should be moved to adult prison.
"This adolescent totally lacks empathy," Wheless said, according to WFAA. "The acceptance of responsibility needs more than a plea agreement. His behavior doesn't show acceptance and responsibility."
The boy told the court that he regrets what he did and feels a tremendous amount of remorse. "Not a day goes by when I don't think of him and cry myself to sleep."
