By Cathy Locke
clocke@sacbee.com
A Woodland man with a prison record has been sentenced to 31 years to life behind bars for punching a man who tried to break up a fight during Davis' 2009 Picnic Day.
Steven Hector Martinez, 35, was convicted by a Yolo County jury on March 12 of one count of battery with serious bodily injury and was sentenced today by Yolo Superior Court Judge Kathleen White.
On April 18, 2009, the victim reported that he was at the Bistro 33 restaurant in downtown Davis when he saw people he thought he knew getting into a fight in the street area. When the victim went over to stop the fight, Martinez, a stranger to the victim, "sucker punched" the man in the face with his fist, according to a Yolo County District Attorney's Office news release.
Martinez and the group with him then fled. But a concerned University of California, Davis, student witnessed the attack and followed the group. The student used his cell phone to call 911, relayed the group's movements and descriptions, and confirmed when a Davis police had stopped the right person.
The student and the victim identified Martinez as the attacker.
A known Sureno gang associate, Martinez had been released from prison only 100 days before the incident, officials said.
The victim went to the hospital by ambulance but left before being treated because, he said, there were two elderly men who appeared to be in worse condition than he was, according to the news release. Three days later, however, the victim went to the hospital where a CT scan revealed that his eye socket was shattered in two places.
Judge White's sentence was based on the application of California's "Three Strikes Law." Martinez previously had been convicted of four felonies, including a 1996 shooting in Woodland where he fired several shots from a semiautomatic gun into a crowd of rival gang members, the news release said. One bullet hit a 19-year-old man in the throat, and another bullet struck a 16-year-old youth in the leg.
Call The Bee's Cathy Locke, (916) 321-5287.
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