2. David's Story

05/15/23 • 51 min

By the end of Night Raid episode one, two conflicting stories emerged: the SWAT team says David Martinez shot Officer Shaun Diamond in the first moments of the raid on the house in San Gabriel, but David’s parents claim the officers shot their own man. Episode two places you on the scene as David’s story evolves from the seconds after the shooting to a pretrial conference three years later. You’ll hear the police dash cam audio, recordings in David’s holding cell, his interview with detectives, audio from undercover officers posing as inmates, jail phone calls, and reenactments of David’s preliminary hearing. Ultimately, the physical evidence leads us to the conclusion that David likely shot Officer Diamond; but did he pull the trigger in self defense, thinking the police were Mongols? With David’s trial on the horizon, his public defender Brady Sullivan is left with a near impossible task: convincing a jury that a man who shot a police officer from approximately five feet away is not guilty of murder.

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Previous Episode

1. Two Sides of the Same Door

The first episode of Night Raid is a Rashomon of the 4am SWAT raid on the Martinez residence in San Gabriel. In a matter of seconds, David’s father was shot in the arm and Pomona SWAT officer Shaun Diamond was shot in the neck, and later died ... but who fired? Recordings of detective interviews show even police witnesses weren’t sure what happened in the critical moments when the SWAT team breached the front door. The episode includes an emotional interview with Shaun’s mother and letters from David’s sister ... showing how the shock of the incident devastated both families and how confusion about the narrative of the raid left them feeling powerless.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

3. The Raid

The 2014 SWAT raid on the Martinez home, which left a Pomona police officer dead, was part of a multi-jurisdictional operation targeting members of the Mongols Motorcycle Club. So what was David Martinez’s relationship with the Mongols, and how did that relationship lead to a raid on his family home in San Gabriel? In this episode we zoom out from the night of the raid to see a bigger picture that includes the Mongols’ long history with the ATF and David’s fraught history with them. We then explore the SWAT raid itself with police militarization expert Radley Balko, plus the search warrant affidavit, police operations reports, and shocking interviews with detectives after the raid.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.