71-year-old charged for attempted deliberate homicide
David Martel, 71, has been charged with a felony count of attempted deliberate homicide.
County Attorney Josh Racki said that Martel appeared in court on Jan. 15 and the judge set his bail at $100,000.
Great Falls Police officers were dispatched to a family disturbance around 3:41 a.m. Jan. 14 at 1700 2nd Ave. N.
Martel told dispatchers that he’d shot an adult male.
Officers told detectives around 5:50 a.m. that when they arrived on scene they could hear the victim, C.M., yelling for help and that he’d been shot.
Martel told officers on scene, “I am the one who shot him,” according to court documents.
Officers located a pistol lying in Martel’s bedroom that had an empty chamber and magazine and recovered a 9mm Luger casing inside Martel’s pants pocket, according to court documents.
Martel told officers he’d picked up the casing and put it in his pocket.
The gun, and the house, belong to Martel’s girlfriend, who is the victim’s grandmother, according to court documents.
Officers observed what appeared to be a gunshot wound at the bottom of C.M.’s rib cage to the left of the center of his body, according to court documents, and a baseball sized lump on the center of his back that was red and black.
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C.M. told responders that he’d smoked methamphetamine about four hours earlier and hospital staff told officers that he was in critical condition and was taken into emergency surgery.
Martel and his girlfriend, the homeowner and victim’s grandmother, told officers that they’d been sleeping with the firearm that was used in the shooting as protection.
They told police they’d been woken up by C.M. being disruptive by yelling and banging in the basement. C.M. was looking for his keys and the couple heard him making threats toward them if they were hiding his keys, according to court documents.
The victim’s grandmother told officers that when Martel left the bedroom to talk to C.M., she heard C.M. say “you’re not going to tell me what to do, old man,” and Martel told him “not to come at him,” and a few seconds later, she said she heard a gunshot, according to court documents.
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Martel told his girlfriend to call police and Martel spoke to dispatchers and said he put the gun in the bedroom to wait for officers, according to court documents.
Martel’s girlfriend, and C.M.’s grandmother, told police that she was afraid of C.M.
In an interview at the police department, Martel told officers that he knew there was one bullet in the gun’s chamber, but didn’t know if there were more. He told officers that he’d been sitting in the living room while C.M. was in the kitchen area with “that look in his eye” and “came at him,” according to court documents.
Martel told officers that he aimed for center mass and fired one shot at C.M., picked up the casing, put in his pocket, then told his girlfriend to call 911, according to court documents.
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Martel told officers that he was afraid C.M. would fight him or harm him if he didn’t shoot him but officers said it appeared Martel was having difficulty giving a clear description of what C.M. was doing just before he shot him and observed some inconsistencies in his and his girlfriend’s statements of the timeline of the incident.
A GFPD detective also interviewed Martel, during which he said there wasn’t a history of physical altercations between the two and there had been no weapons in C.M.’s hands.
Martel told officers that for the last few months he’d been sleeping with the gun for protection due to C.M.’s behavior and Martel frequently sat in the living room chair with the gun tucked in the chair, “waiting for C.M. to cross an imaginary line,” and that during the Jan. 14 incident that C.M. had cross that line, at which point Martel shot C.M., according to court documents.
Martel’s criminal history includes some misdemeanors primarily from the 1980s.
