SHOSHONE — Francisco Javier Bravo-Martinez lay bleeding in the snow last winter with gunshot wounds to his right leg and chest when a man approached him, placed a pistol against his head, told him “bye, bye, ass——,” and fired three times.
Somehow, Bravo-Martinez survived what was supposed to be his execution.
On Tuesday, he limped to a microphone in Lincoln County District Court and for the first time since the shooting addressed his would-be executioner, David Gonzales Ceballos.
“It’s already been a year,” Bravo-Martinez said in Spanish. “A year since you decided I didn’t deserve to live. A year since you bid me farewell. But look at me, I survived.”
People are also reading…
Ceballos, 25, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison with eligibility for parole after 16 years.
“On that day, I went and pretty much put a pistol to someone’s head and proceeded to shoot him,” the Jerome man said while entering his guilty plea in November.
“Did you have the intent to kill Mr. Martinez?” District Judge John Butler asked.
“Yes, sir,” Ceballos answered.
Butler also ordered Ceballos on Tuesday to pay more than $145,000 in fines and restitution, most of it to cover his victim’s hospital bills.
But despite the plea and sentencing, Butler said the reasons for the shooting, which involved several other people, “remain a mystery.”
“It’s still certainly not clear to this court why Mr. Ceballos and others chose to do what they did on that day,” Butler said.
Bravo-Martinez testified he drove into the desert southwest of Shoshone to help Ceballos and others in a fight on Jan. 23, 2016. When he exited his SUV to check a broken headlight, he said, he was ambushed, shot twice by another man and three times by Ceballos. He testified that all three shots from close range grazed him, and one cracked his skull.
But Bravo-Martinez’s testimony contradicted large parts of the testimony of Erik Lopez, originally a suspect in the case who testified against his co-defendants in exchange for immunity. And a presentence investigation in Ceballos’ case offered few new details, according to the judge, who offered his own theory Tuesday that the whole thing might have been a drug deal gone bad.
“(But) I still don’t think we have the story — the true story,” Butler said. “And I don’t know that we ever will.”
Ceballos’ co-defendant, 22-year-old Antonio Jacob Gallegos, is charged with firing the first two shots that wounded Bravo-Martinez. He’s due to stand trial in April.
On Tuesday, defense attorney Theodore Larsen asked for a 12- to 24-year sentence. Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney E. Scott Paul asked for 25 years without parole.
The prosecutor called the shooting the second-most violent act he’s seen in nearly 20 years on the job and likened it to a judge handing down a life sentence.
“It just struck me,” Paul said of Ceballos’ statement during his guilty plea, “That a person would have the malignance, the hatred, the wherewithal to say, ‘I’m sitting in judgement and choose to terminate your life.’”
Ceballos apologized to Bravo-Martinez and his family, then apologized to his own family, including his mother, who spoke passionately on his behalf asking that Butler show mercy on her son.
“David was a very good kid,” Teresa Ceballos said in Spanish. “A hard worker, a studier, respectful. But he changed since 2014, when he started hanging around these people.”
But it was Bravo-Martinez’s statement Tuesday that seemed to have the most impact.
“At first I had doubts about speaking today,” Bravo-Martinez told his attacker. “I wasn’t sure if you deserved to know about me.”
He talked about the nightmares of the shooting that jolt him awake at the same time every night, the injuries he suffered and the work he’s lost because of those injuries. He said there is a surgery that could fully repair his injured leg, but he’s lost hope of a full recovery because the surgery would cost too much.
“But with all this being said, I’d like to thank you for something,” Bravo-Martinez said. “Even after all this trauma, there was a light. I managed to find God, after being lost for so long ... and I got back my family, my children. I’m blessed to be by their side.”