Tony Martinez
Biography
Tony Martinez was one of Los Siete de la Raza, a group of young Latino men from the Mission District of San Francisco charged in the May 1, 1969 death of plainclothes police officer Joseph Brodnik. Brodnik and his partner had confronted the group over a suspected burglary when a struggle broke out and Brodnik was fatally shot; the defense argued the fatal shot came from the gun of his own partner during the scuffle. Tony Martinez was arrested and jailed pending trial, and the case became a major cause of the Bay Area Chicano and Latino movement, which built a defense committee, the newspaper Basta Ya, and community survival programs modeled on the Black Panthers. After a lengthy trial, the defendants were acquitted in 1970.
El Gallo names Rodolfo Martinez among the six Los Siete defendants then held in San Francisco City Prison following the May 1, 1969 incident. Its statement that police hunted the defendants for five days does not independently establish one uniform arrest date for every defendant. The report is an interim custody observation and adds no actual discharge or completed term. The separately named fugitive Gio Lopez was not reported in custody. Source: https://digital.auraria.edu/downloads/abqtx-rd289/asdc_archives_E_184_M5_G169_v2_no6.pdf#page=1
The Movement publishes a first-person interview with the six jailed Los Siete defendants, discussing community organizing, education and treatment in custody. Nelson’s account describes the group’s May 6 arrest in Santa Cruz and a separate San Francisco State warrant against him. Collective language is not used to manufacture a missing individual admission or release day, and the interview is not treated as another prosecution. Source: The Movement, November 1969, PDF page 10. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6911mvmt.pdf#page=10
Photo credit
Interviewed in jail in November 1969, Tony Martinez described chairing COBRA at the College of San Mateo. He said the student strike won new counselors and an ethnic studies department, and that COBRA subsequently recruited young people from the Mission District into college. He also described the restrictions imposed on the six jailed Los Siete defendants: they occupied three cells in one block, had limited contact with other blocks, and were awaiting permission to receive college books.
The October 20, 1969 Los Siete hearing report identifies Charles Garry as counsel for Tony and Mario Martinez and Jose Rios, and Judge Karesh as presiding. Garry’s illness caused a postponement. The article supplies no individual actual release date, and its group arrest chronology is not substituted for personal custody dates.
