Enduring Impact

Carlos Martinez was so tired when he got home from work, just after midnight, that he skipped dinner. He drank a glass of water, crawled under the covers next to his wife and promptly fell asleep. He was lying facedown on his pillow when he heard someone outside the window of his Sterling townhouse shout: "Die!"

Then came the crack, crack, crack of gunfire. A window above his bed shattered. Glass rained down on Martinez and his wife. She screamed. He pushed her to the floor. Plaster and glass went flying. The bullets kept coming -- nearly two dozen.

"Everything was breaking all over the place. I said to my wife, 'Someone is shooting the house. Get down,' " Martinez said. "Then I tried to get down, but I couldn't move."

Martinez felt a burning sensation in his left side. Moments later, his daughter Vanessa, 21, crawled into the second-story bedroom on her hands and knees. His son Rommel, 19, called 911. Somehow, Martinez said, they managed to carry him down the stairs. The last thing he heard before he slipped into a coma was the chop, chop, chop of the medivac helicopter blades slapping the thick summer air.

Since that July 19 night, Martinez, who is uninsured, is still dodging bullets: more than $500,000 in medical bills, an inability to work because of the severity of his injuries and the pain from his still-open wound. He tries to sleep but constantly replays the scene as two Sterling teenagers fired a 9mm rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun at his home in the hopes of killing his son, in retaliation for what authorities said was a gang-related dispute.

"I'm afraid to sleep because I keep thinking someone is outside and going to shoot again," said Martinez, 48. The house has three bedrooms, but the family members often sleep together in one room so they will be close if something happens again.

"We got rid of the frames for the bed because we didn't want them to be too high in case someone shoots here again," Vanessa Martinez said.

The family denies that Rommel Martinez is in a gang. Authorities said one of the shooters told them that the teenager belonged to a gang known as "Los Homies."

Carlos Martinez said the first time he saw his assailants, who at one time attended the same high school as his son, was last week in a Leesburg courtroom, when he testified from his wheelchair at their sentencing hearing.

"They were young, but you can just see it on their faces that they were criminals," Martinez said as he sat on his couch rolling a 9mm slug from the shooting between his fingers. "I don't even know them, but they have ruined all my plans for my family's future."

Last week, Loudoun Circuit Judge Herman A. Whisenant Jr. sentenced Israel Trevilla, 17, to eight years in prison for his role in the shooting, and Eric Pang, 16, to five years. Both teenagers were charged and sentenced as adults. But that has done little to assuage Martinez's fear of reprisals, and questions linger about why the family's two-story townhouse in Coventry Square was targeted.

Martinez, who along with his wife received a green card two weeks before the shooting, moved from El Salvador to the United States in 1989. An apartment complex maintenance supervisor before the shooting, Martinez said he has raised all five of his children to avoid trouble and work hard, as he has.

"Yes, we are Latino, and we know that this is a problem. But we don't come from that," Martinez said.

After Trevilla was arrested in August, however, he told investigators that he had targeted the Martinez house because of a long-standing feud over a gang-related assault on Trevilla, said a law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trevilla said he and Pang had decided to celebrate his upcoming birthday that night. The pair drove a stolen 1997 Toyota Corolla to Pang's house, where they had stashed the guns, which had also been stolen days earlier. The two then set out for an ex-girlfriend's house, the first of seven homes hit in the spree.

When Rommel Martinez talks about the shooting, his intense, dark-brown eyes flash with anger.

"Every time I walk through this door, I think about being there with my father on the floor laying in blood," he said. "I'm not in a gang. I don't live like that. We don't live like that."

Yet the gunfire has left no one in the family untouched. The house was in such a state of disrepair after the barrage that Vanessa, Rommel and Marta Martinez, 48, initially slept in the family's bullet-riddled Nissan Pathfinder parked in front of the house. They had nowhere else to go.

Later, the hotel where Marta Martinez works offered them a place to stay.

The family moved back home a month ago after they repaired the damage. Now the beige walls, cheery floral-print couch and clean, new carpet in the living room betray nothing of the bloody scene that unfolded there.

Martinez's children have set aside plans to go to college so they can work to support the family, he said. Vanessa had been planning to go to nursing school. Instead, she works two jobs to help the family keep up with the $1,200 monthly mortgage payments. Rommel started going to school part time so he could work at an auto body shop. Another brother quit his medical studies in El Salvador, and got a job to help with his father's medical expenses.

"We used to order pizza and watch movies together. Now we don't have time together like a family anymore because everybody has to work," Vanessa said.

Thin and frail, Carlos Martinez is hoping a bid by Loudoun County prosecutors to secure $15,000 from the Virginia violent crime victim compensation fund will help his family keep up with his rising medical expenses, but there is no guarantee they will get that much. In the meantime, his family changes the dressings on his wounds and shells out $35 for each of his twice-weekly doctor's visits, he said.

He sits alone in the back room of his house because he's afraid to sit near a window. He is embarrassed by the plastic colostomy bag that sprouts from his stomach beneath the scar running down the middle of his chest. He worries constantly that if his wound becomes infected, he will die and leave his family penniless. Sometimes, he tries to doze off while he watches daytime TV, his only company while his family is at work. But even then, he said, the bullet that nearly killed him still follows him in his sleep.