.13 SECONDS

By Alan Judd
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

At the moment 2010 became 2011, Sergio Martinez stepped into his kitchen. Across the street, Ervin Turner Sr. raised his handgun to welcome the new year. In her living room, Martinez’s niece Marlen felt a curtain flutter, as if a sudden wind had entered the house.

The sound of gunfire. Breaking glass. A scream. And Georgia’s first casualty of gun violence in 2011. All in 0.13 seconds, three times faster than the blink of an eye.

The bullet that sped across Worcester Place in Lilburn forever changed two families that had shared only a passing acquaintance. It also heralded an historic change: Since that night, Georgians have been more likely to die in a shooting than in a car crash.

Sergio Martinez’s fatal wound added Georgia to the growing list of states where gun deaths eclipsed traffic fatalities over the past decade, a shift that occurred as the federal government mandated safer cars while allowing firearms to remain as lethal and as available as ever, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

For years, researchers and regulators focused on curbing certain kinds of traumatic deaths, especially those from motor vehicle accidents. They gathered statistics and tested safety measures; crash-test dummies became a fixture in the popular culture. Seat belts and collapsible steering columns, rear-view cameras and air bags, and many other innovations made vehicles infinitely safer.

Guns are different. Under the Second Amendment, bearing arms is a constitutional right. Other activities, such as driving, are mere privileges. With this in mind, Congress has cut funding for most federally sponsored research into gun violence, while also rejecting proposals to restrict gun ownership and to require safety features on new weapons. Research has been so sparse that a scientific panel took 124 pages in 2013 just to outline what needs to be studied.

Consequently, gun deaths increased in all but five states and the District of Columbia between 2003 and 2013, while traffic fatalities declined in all but four states during that time, according to the Journal-Constitution’s analysis of government statistics, insurance industry data and records from state vital-records offices.

In 2003, the newspaper found, more people died from shootings than car crashes in just two states and the District of Columbia. By 2013, that was the case in 29 states and D.C.

Georgia’s tipping point came on a cool, drizzly night in Lilburn. Like many others, this shooting was neither planned nor expected — just a thing that happened. If not for the presence of a firearm, no harm would have occurred.

On one side of Worcester Place, Ervin Turner and his stepson, Jesse Foster, prepared to celebrate the new year by firing Turner’s handgun at their front lawn. Across the street, Sergio Martinez’s extended family gathered for a holiday dinner. They intended to stay in all evening, Sergio’s niece Marlen Martinez said later, so they wouldn’t have to share the road with drunk drivers.

At home, they figured, they would be safe.

Sergio Martinez was born on the Fourth of July.

It was 1976, the American bicentennial, and even though he was Mexican and never became a U.S. citizen, his birth date gave him a special connection to his new country.

Martinez left Mexico City in the 1990s. He moved first to a suburb of Los Angeles and then, in 2000, to Atlanta, where he found work installing granite and marble countertops. The youngest of 11 siblings, he never married and had no children of his own by age 34. He instead was the comic uncle who kept his nieces and nephews entertained.

“He devoted his time to us,” Marlen Martinez said recently.

Sergio Martinez lived with several members of his family in a diverse, working-class subdivision near Indian Trail Road in Lilburn. The lawns are small, and the houses — ranches and split-levels, most built in the 1970s and early 1980s — stand close together. High-voltage power lines run through a field beside the neighborhood. But home prices are affordable; in April 2010, Ervin Turner bought the house across Worcester from Martinez’s for $90,000.

On New Year’s Eve 2010, Martinez took one of his nieces shopping. That night he wore the outfit he bought that day: a plaid button-up shirt over a white T-shirt and jeans. In his right earlobe, he inserted a square ring consisting of nine colorless stones arranged in the pattern of tic-tac-toe.

Fifteen members of Martinez’s family got together on Worcester Place that night, including five children younger than 5. Dinner lasted for hours, Marlen Martinez said recently: “a couple of drinks, music — just staying inside the house.”

As midnight approached, Sergio and Marlen relaxed in the living room, at the front of the house. Marlen’s 2-year-old daughter sat on her great-uncle’s lap.

Sergio put the child down to grab a beer from the kitchen. Marlen happened to glance at her phone. It was 11:59. With the countdown to midnight under way, she turned down the volume on the stereo. From somewhere outside, she heard gunshots.

Then something blew through the curtain, and she heard a scream from the kitchen.

Georgia recorded 1,232 deaths from gunshot wounds in 2011, six more than from injuries in car crashes.

Just three years earlier, traffic fatalities had outnumbered gun deaths by more than 300.

On the first day of 2011 alone, 11 people died from gunshot wounds in Georgia: Martinez and three others in homicides, seven by suicide.

The first three suicides happened close together, all in the lonely hours of early morning. At 1:55 a.m., a 37-year-old satellite-television technician shot himself to death in DeKalb County. Ten minutes later, a 42-year-old military contractor died after shooting himself at his Hall County home. In another 30 minutes, the director of an assisted living facility in Carrollton, also 42, shot herself in the head, also at home.

As the day continued, an 18-year-old was shot to death in a Stone Mountain parking lot, and a 16-year-old died after a street-corner shooting in Rockmart. A 73-year-old jail employee from Bulloch County died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. A college student, 22, killed himself in Valdosta, shortly before a 64-year-old nursing home administrator from Conyers and a 42-year-old mortgage banker from Eatonton also took their lives. The killings ended that evening when someone shot a 23-year-old warehouse laborer in southwest Atlanta.

The roads in Georgia were relatively safe that day. Statewide, just four people died in traffic accidents.

The day reflected trends that had been developing for years.

Suicides by gun far outnumber homicides, although the latter receive more news coverage and public attention. Accidental deaths from gunshots are relatively rare.

Gun deaths have been steadily on the rise since the early 2000s: by 8 percent in Georgia, 12 percent nationwide. At least nine states recorded increases in gun deaths of more than 25 percent from 2003 to 2013. The only significant decrease occurred in what had long been one of the most violent cities in the country: Washington, D.C. Fewer than half as many people there died from gunshot wounds in 2013 as in 2003. Declines there continued even after a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision threw out the District’s gun-control law, perhaps the strictest in the nation.

During the same period, motor vehicle deaths nationwide and in Georgia dropped by about one-fourth, largely because of “comprehensive prevention strategies” developed through rigorous research, according to the federal panel that compiled research needs two years ago.

“A similar public health framework,” the panel said, “may be particularly effective in the case of gun violence.”

But the panel, convened by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, asked more questions than it could answer: Should weapons be confiscated from people who are suicidal or those who are under restraining orders because of domestic violence? Should background checks be expanded to prevent gun purchases by felons or people judged to be mentally ill? Should emerging smart-gun technologies — fingerprint-activated triggers or radio-controlled safety devices, for instance — be required on newly manufactured firearms?

Whether any gun-safety measures, individually or in tandem, could prevent specific killings is far from certain. In Sergio Martinez’s case, for example, Ervin Turner had no criminal record, had never been treated for mental illness and had legally purchased his handgun. Because he was the weapon’s owner, smart-gun features would not have prevented the gun from firing.

Short of Turner’s never having fired his gun that midnight, it’s possible nothing could have saved Martinez’s life.

Moving at 1,200 feet per second, the bullet that entered Sergio Martinez’s house pierced one of the four windows facing Worcester Place.

It flew past a pair of stereo speakers in the living room. It missed a fireplace and a staircase. It did nothing to disturb a Christmas tree that remained in the living room a week after the holiday.

The bullet sped down a central hallway, past the dining room where the dinner dishes still had not been cleared from the table.

It continued unobstructed all the way through the house to the kitchen.

Martinez, a heavyset man at 5 feet 9 inches and 236 pounds, had just joined a cluster of family members. Before anyone knew what was happening, the bullet struck Martinez squarely in the head.

The cartridge split apart when it hit Martinez’s skull, and one fragment lodged in the ceiling near a heating vent. A cloud of fine white dust descended from the Sheetrock as Martinez, as if in slow motion, slumped to the floor.

For a moment, the others thought he was joking. Then they saw blood pooling on the floor around his head. Someone screamed.

Marlen Martinez, six months pregnant with her second child, rushed toward the kitchen, but another uncle held her back. The men herded the women and children into an upstairs bedroom before it occurred to them the bullet may have come through the roof. So they all ran to the basement.

Amid this chaos, Marlen’s father called 911. It was 52 seconds after midnight.

The first police officers on the scene escorted the family outside; flashing lights from emergency vehicles bounced off the houses as curious neighbors assembled in clusters up and down Worcester Place. Paramedics arrived moments later but didn’t bring Sergio out.

Eventually, a police officer came to talk to the family. Sergio, he told them, was dead.

Marlen recalls her father, Juan Martinez, collapsing onto the pavement.

“Why?” he cried. “Why?”

The police kept the family out of the house until daybreak, when the medical examiner removed Sergio’s body.

Marlen and most of the others grabbed a few clothes and other belongings and left.

Her parents stayed behind to scrub the blood off the kitchen floor.

Sergio Martinez didn’t stand much of a chance of surviving.

The bullet hit near the center of his forehead, just below the hairline, according to an autopsy report. It cut a ⅜-inch laceration across his scalp, moving front to back and left to right. A large fragment ended up in the back of his brain.

Such wounds, especially if they cross the brain’s midline, are almost always fatal, said Dr. Jeffrey Nicholas, head of Grady Memorial Hospital’s Marcus Trauma Center.

Gunshot wounds typically cause more harm than other types of traumatic injuries, Nicholas said. Bullets tend to “tumble” inside the body, he said, deviating from a straight-line trajectory and tearing into any number of internal organs. For instance, a gunshot wound to the abdomen may damage the liver, the large intestines, the small intestines and the surrounding tissue. Nicholas likened the effect to a shock wave that worsens the destruction.

Even gunshot wounds that don’t kill their victim can be devastating. People shot in the spine often are left without the use of their arms or legs or both. In all cases, Nicholas said, rapid treatment is essential.

“Generally, if they get to us in time, we’re able to intervene and do something positive for them,” he said. Even then, recovery often takes a year or more.

Grady’s trauma center in downtown Atlanta treated 615 gunshot victims in 2014 — on average, one every 14 hours, nearly two a day, every day of the year.

Eighty-six percent of patients with gunshot wounds recovered. Most who didn’t died in the first few critical hours after arriving at the hospital.

“The biggest key to good outcomes is prevention,” Nicholas said. But he added: “The guns are still out there for those who intend to do something bad with them.”

When police officers knocked on Ervin Turner’s door, he was asleep — oblivious, he told them, to the commotion outside. A detective who questioned Turner would later describe smelling “an intense odor of an alcoholic beverage.”

A few minutes before Martinez was shot, a neighbor had called 911 to report gunshots being fired outside Turner’s house. Turner’s lawyer said later that several people nearby were firing at the same time.

Turner, a 62-year-old truck driver, owned an Italian-made 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. The weapon retailed new for about $269. Turner said he kept it for self-protection at home but rarely removed it from the nightstand in his bedroom.

Turner didn’t think he was responsible for Martinez’s death and turned over his gun to the police.

At first, he said he and Foster, his 20-year-old stepson, fired the weapon “a couple of times” into the ground from his front porch, according to police reports. Later, Turner told a detective they may have fired 12 to 15 rounds — “maybe a full clip.”

The next morning, officers combed the soil beneath the boxwoods that line Turner’s porch railing. They recovered 31 shell casings.

Most models of Turner’s weapon hold 13 rounds: 12 in the magazine, one in the chamber. To fire 31 shots, he would have had to reload twice.

Working backward from the fragment lodged in Martinez’s kitchen ceiling, police technicians used a laser to trace the bullet’s path. It led them back down the hall, through the living room and the front window, down a slight hill to the street and, finally, to its point of origin, 150 feet away: Turner’s front porch.

Almost two years passed before Turner and Foster went to court on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Marlen Martinez was the first witness. She showed Judge Warren Davis of Gwinnett Superior Court a picture of her uncle and said his death had robbed her family of joy.

“It’s all the holidays that we would celebrate are no longer a celebration for us,” she told the judge. “It’s just everything comes back to that night and how it happened. It just happened from one second to the next.”

Marlen’s sister Ariana said Sergio was always upbeat, “always the one to keep a smile on our face.”

Their brother Juan said: “I mean, it’s just hard to move on.”

In back-to-back appearances in court, Turner and Foster each pleaded guilty. Without knowing for sure which of them fired the shot that killed Martinez, each also took responsibility for his death.

“Any time you lose a loved one, no matter how it happened, it’s an ugly thing,” Turner told the judge. “I sympathize with them, and I am sorry that it happened the way that it happened.”

“I wish I could take it back,” Foster said.

The judge said the tragedy lay not only in Sergio’s death, but in the surrounding circumstances.

“They gathered together so they would be safe as a family,” Davis said. “We should all be safe in our homes. That’s what our country was founded on — safe in our homes. And they lost that.”

The judge spoke directly to the elder defendant.

“It’s easy, Mr. Turner, to be mad at you,” he said. But he noted Turner had no criminal history, accepted blame for the shooting, and in the meantime had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“Pointless,” Davis said.

Then he pronounced the sentences: For Foster, five years of probation. For Turner, 10 years, with 40 months to serve in prison.

A deputy sheriff led Turner out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

Turner, now 66, is serving his sentence at Washington State Prison in Davisboro, 2 ½ hours from his home in Lilburn. He is eligible for release in December.

Foster, 24, remains on probation. He is a father now, working full time — “a good kid,” said his lawyer, Keith Adams.

Neither Turner nor Foster agreed to be interviewed.

But like Martinez’s family, both father and stepson have suffered for their crime, said Turner’s lawyer, Careton Matthews.

“There are no winners in a case like this, where there were no intentions to do harm at all,” Matthews said recently. “They clearly believed they were just firing the weapon into the ground and that none of the bullets went anywhere except in the ground.”

Martinez’s family sent his body home to Mexico for burial near his mother. Shortly after the shooting, they moved away from Worcester Place.

“We couldn’t stay there,” Marlen said recently. “It was just too much.”

But she said her family holds no ill will toward Turner and Foster: “They did what they did, they know what they did, and they’re paying for it.”

The Martinez family settled a lawsuit against Turner and Foster about the time the pair pleaded guilty in the criminal case. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. In the years since, many of Sergio’s relatives have regularly attended events that honor victims of violent crime, including an annual candlelight vigil at Gwinnett County’s courthouse.

Some of them, though, continue to struggle.

One relative, Marlen said, still suffers panic attacks related to the shooting. Others received psychological therapy for years. As the criminal case went to court, Marlen and her husband found themselves too anxious to sleep.

“We lived everything again,” she said.

On a recent afternoon at her new home on a cul-de-sac in Lawrenceville, Marlen said she has heard gunshots in every neighborhood where she has lived. Guns, she said, are a big part of the American culture.

“I’m not against guns, but I’m not in favor, either,” she said. “Those bullets are so quick you don’t know where they’re going to go. You don’t know how you’re going to impact a family. It’s not like you lose one life and that’s it. You affect a lot of people.”

FIND OUT MORE: Read the summary of the report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.