John Jefferson
Main: Jesus Valdez, Jr., prior arrest from 2018 for choking his mother. Right inset: Valdez appears in court with 187 tattoo visible to Tony Martinez’s family (KUTV).
A Surenos 13 gang member paroled multiple times after violent offenses shot and killed a handyman over “construction noise” while on a meth binge more than four years ago, only for his own father to tell Utah investigators that his “motherf—er” son “did it, there’s no question about it.” When the admitted murderer showed up to court for sentencing last month and learned his fate, a tattoo on the back of his shaved head prominently displayed the number “187,” adding yet another layer of outrage to the already alarming case.
Jesus Valdez, Jr., is going to spend the next 15 years to life behind bars for shooting 39-year-old Melbin “Tony” Martinez repeatedly on May 28, 2020, as the father to a young daughter worked on a house in West Valley City, next door to where his killer lived.
Local CBS affiliate KUTV has closely followed the case over the years to investigate why a violent offender who had attacked both of his parents and threatened to kill an ex-girlfriend was allowed out of prison and stayed out of prison despite parole violations. The latest update relates to Valdez’s Sept. 20 appearance in court and his head tattoo — which neither jailers, the judge, nor prosecutors noticed at the time, but which Martinez’s brother-in-law, for one, regarded in the aftermath as “completely unacceptable.”
According to the report, Martinez’s family was sitting right behind Valdez in court and couldn’t help noticing the large “187” tattoo, a tattoo interpreted to refer to the section of California Penal Code that criminalizes murder. The report said that the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, the judge’s office, and the district attorney’s office all said they were unaware of the tattoo, with the judge’s communications director adding that this kind of incident hasn’t happened before.
Notably, Valdez had the tattoo well before May 29, 2020, the day he was arrested for the crime and well before he displayed it in court. Bodycam video from 2018 showed the tattoo as he reacted with surprise when cops put him in handcuffs for strangling his mother.
“When was the last time you did time?” an officer asked.
Valdez was jumpy and seemed to have trouble keeping his arms still.
“I just barely got out, dude, f—. A week and a half,” Valdez said at the time. “F— man are you serious?”
Valdez went on to be paroled, with deadly consequences for a man who was just doing his job and in no way provoked his killer, though cops reportedly believed the shooter was “disturbed by the construction noise.”
On the very day of the murder, KUTV reported, agents with Utah Adult Probation & Parole visited Valdez and determined he was “doing very well.”
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