Tragedy Leaves Mark On Everyone

She remembers that he held a pencil. It was in his hand when Kathy Forshee got to him, the blacktop hot to the touch, the terrible August sun overhead. He was on his side, head on the pavement, blood spreading in all directions, seeping under him, spoiling his neatly pressed uniform.

Why are you showing this to me, God? Kathy wondered.

She had been at her parents’ cabin in Payson and was returning to Phoenix - Kathy and her mother, her 10-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter. They were in the car driving south on the Beeline Highway when they saw him.

“I’d seen that patrol car hundreds of times,” she said. “He was always there as we drove up or back. Now there were these older fellows directing traffic. And a man in the patrol car trying to use the radio. And the officer … on the ground. I didn’t even know his name.”

It was Bob Martin. He was 57 years old and had worked for the state Department of Public Safety for 27 years. That day in 1995, he’d been patrolling a stretch of Arizona 87.

Investigators believe Martin pulled over a car driven by a 19-year-old named Ernesto Martinez. As the officer approached the vehicle, he was shot four times. His pistol was stolen. He was left on the road.

Martinez may have passed Kathy Forshee earlier on the highway. She remembers a maniac driver cutting in front of her on the way south. A few minutes later, they came upon Martin.

His eyes were closed. He was barely breathing. She dialed 911 on her portable telephone, then waited for help. The emergency operator asked her to look at Martin’s notebook to see if he’d written anything down. But he hadn’t. The pencil he held had never touched the pad.

As Kathy and her mother hovered over the patrolman, her son appeared behind them, carrying a pillow that they kept in the car.

“He wanted to put it under Officer Martin’s head,” she says. “But I didn’t want him to see all the blood. I yelled, ‘Go back to the car!’ I didn’t want him to see.”

Kathy and her mother spoke softly to the dying man. They told him to hang on, that his wife would be expecting him. They didn’t know then that Martin was married. That he had grown children, a grandchild.

“The last people with him weren’t hurting him,” Kathy says. “That’s good, I guess. But it still haunts me. I can’t get it out of my head. I wanted so much to help him. But he died. I held his hand, you know? But I didn’t put that pillow under his head. It’s been over a year now. I still have dreams.”

The day after the shooting, Martinez was arrested in Indio, Calif. He was charged with Martin’s murder and with using the officer’s gun to kill a convenience-store clerk in Blythe. His trial is set for early December.

Kathy’s trial is ongoing.

“I’ve been to counseling,” she says. “My daughter has had to take medication. My son, he talks about Officer Martin all the time, saying what a hero he was. He cut out a picture of him from the newspaper.”

Last April, Arizona 87 between Phoenix and Payson was named the Duthie-Martin Highway in honor of Martin and DPS Officer Gilbert Duthie, who was killed in a traffic accident there in 1970.

A friend of Martin at DPS says the officer’s family is doing well. The best it can, anyway.

“When I pray, I ask God why he put me there that day,” Kathy says. “Maybe it was just to be nice to Officer Martin in the end. But it takes a terrible toll.”

A few months ago, Kathy visited the cemetery where Bob Martin is buried. Kathy had been there before but returned this time because her son asked her to go.

So they went.

They stood together near the grave for a while, remembering what they’ll never forget, talking, praying, then leaving behind a gift, something they’d carried for a long time and now left on top of Martin’s headstone: a pillow.

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