Joshua Orta, who was a passenger in the car when federal law enforcement fatally shot Ruben Ray Martinez, died in a February car crash.
SAN ANTONIO — The passenger who was riding with Ruben Ray Martinez when the 23-year-old San Antonio man was killed by a federal immigration agent last year later contradicted law enforcement’s account of the confrontation, saying he “never knew Ruben to be violent.”
That passenger, Joshua Orta, has been referred to as a “critical eyewitness” by an attorney for Martinez’s mother. Orta provided a witness statement in September, six months after Martinez was fatally shot on South Padre Island. In the statement, obtained by CBS News, Orta asserts that the pair were returning to where they were staying when they came upon the scene of an accident.
An officer approached the car, Orta said, and “told us to turn around and leave, without issuing a citation or waning,” despite Orta saying there was an open container next to Martinez.
“As we inched forward in traffic to get turned around, another officer, a state trooper, walked up to our car (and) slapped the hood,” Orta’s statement reads. “I later learned that the trooper’s report said that Ruben had ‘hit’ the officer. That’s not true.”
Orta stated the trooper “wasn’t moving out of the way when we tried to turn around and leave,” after which other law enforcement approached the car and “started yelling at us to stop.”
“I even saw them draw their guns,” Orta’s statement reads. “This was crazy to me because we were only crawling, like the car was in gear, but just coasting. Ruben never hit the gas. The troopers were never in danger from Ruben.”
At some point, a Homeland Security Investigations officer who Orta asserted “was in no danger from the car” fired multiple times at Ruben from no more than two feet away, the statement reads. Orta claimed the officer did so without providing a warning or command.
“I heard Ruben say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then he slumped backward,” Orta reported, before also claiming law enforcement pulled his friend’s body from the car and handcuffed him even though “he was clearly unconscious or already dead.”
Martinez was killed months before national scrutiny of ICE tactics and federal immigration enforcement tactics swelled in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Orta’s statement paints a different picture than the internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) incident report on Martinez’s death; reports on that document, first obtained by Newsweek last week, amount to the first time ICE personnel have been connected to Martinez’s March 2025 death.
The ICE report states federal immigration agents were assisting with traffic control after a major crash when one agent opened fire on the driver of a Ford vehicle that had accelerated forward and struck a fellow agent; an account at odds with Orta’s witness statement. A spokesperson with ICE said the federal agent that opened fire was trying “to protect himself, his fellow agents and the general public.”
In his witness statement, Orta described himself as a lifelong friend of Martinez and said he was fatally shot just five days after turning 23. The pair were on South Padre Island for a “spontaneous” trip.
He said he was held at the scene for hours, without being informed of his rights. While acknowledging the pair had an “open liquor bottle in the back seat” and some marijuana, Orta said Martinez “never did anything or behaved in any way that warrned the use of deadly force.”
“His killing was unjustified and excessive,” the witness statement reads.
Orta himself died in a single-vehicle highway crash near downtown San Antonio on Saturday morning, according SAPD records. He was 25 years old.
A GoFundMe verified by his family describes Orta as a “loving, caring and giving person who touched the lives of many.”
‘All we have wanted is justice’
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones over the weekend called for a congressional investigation into the 2025 shooting and the role the Department of Homeland Security played in it.
“It’s unclear any department-led investigations would be fairly executed, as evident by the delay in getting answers to this point,” Jones said. “Regardless of where our residents go, everyone deserves to be safe, and they deserve timely answers when a loved one has been killed.”
Meanwhile, Martinez’s loved ones say they are still waiting for accountability 11 months after his death. The family’s attorneys said they were pushing for an investigation into “why a federal officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen as he was trying to comply with instructions from the local law enforcement officers directing traffic.”
“We believe Joshua’s account, and, as we have seen recently in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere, it is critical that the public be shown every piece of evidence in the government’s possession, and that any witness come forward,” the attorney for Rachel Reyes, Martinez’s mother, said in a statement.
Reyes herself said the family has “struggled with the silence” surrounding Martinez’s death over the last year.
“Now, the country is in crisis,” Reyes said. “And, terribly, heartbreakingly, other families are enduring what we have. It’s my hope that attention being raised now into Ruben’s death will help bring the justice we want for him and the answers we haven’t had.”