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Car Salesman Kidnapped At Gunpoint — Jose Martinez Escaped, Shot Captor, And Survived

By Shelley Hazen

From the archive: published Jan 5, 2016, 10 years ago. Details may have changed since.

It sounds like something out of a movie, but what happened to 22-year-old car salesman Jose Martinez was all too real. The young man was kidnapped by someone posing as a customer and stuffed in a trunk, but narrowly escaped to live another day.

“He said, ‘I fought mom.’ I said, ‘I know, you did good. You did really good,’ ” his mother, Melissa Martinez, told KHOU a day after her son was kidnapped. “He wasn’t just going to lay there and let them do whatever they wanted to do. I didn’t raise him like that.”

The car salesman is now resting at his mother’s home, suffering a fractured nose and gashes all over his body.

It all began around 6 p.m. Monday at the Gillman Dodge dealership in southwest Houston, KTRK reported. Two men walked into the dealership and asked the car salesman for a test drive of a Dodge Challenger.

Martinez said that her son was in the Challenger with one man, whom she described was posing as a customer, when her son noticed two more men following them in a Sedan.

“He kind of noticed the (Sedan) following (them) and when he told the guy to turn one way and he didn’t, he turned the other way.”

The supposedly routine test drive came to abrupt stop, the men beat the car salesman and then shoved him into the trunk. But the young man wasn’t about to be kidnapped without putting up a good fight.

While still in the trunk, he texted his manager to let him know he had been kidnapped, and the manager was then able to track his phone with an app to a nearby intersection. A private security officer, who covers the neighborhood around the dealership, said one of his officers was on patrol when he was notified that a car salesman nearby had been kidnapped.

Still trapped, Jose was able to pull the emergency trigger and open the trunk while the vehicle was still moving; he rolled out of the vehicle in the area of the dealership, KHOU added. KTRK implied that the car salesman escaped after the Dodge had stopped.

Either way, Jose wasn’t going to go down without a fight, his mother recalled. At one point, the suspect pointed a gun at her son, but he knocked it right out of his kidnapper’s hand.

“He jumped out and he started fighting and they beat him. He was beating up the other guy and they dropped their gun and he grabbed it.”

That gun was loaded with one bullet, and the kidnapped car salesman shot one of his captors in the neck. CBS News reported that no one was shot.

The kidnappers drove off, leaving Jose behind. But the kidnapped car salesman’s phone was still in the trunk, and police used it to track the two suspects in the stolen Dodge. Police caught up to them and briefly engaged in a rather dramatic chase that ended when the suspects crashed into a postal truck.

They jumped out of the Challenger and fled, and, as of Tuesday, have yet to be found or identified. Police found Martinez walking along the side of the freeway and took him to the hospital.

A worker at the dealership described the neighborhood where the dealership is located as “not a good one to be in,” but was still shocked by what happened to his co-worker. He was also impressed that Jose was able to fight back.

Martinez said that while the suspects failed in stealing the new Dodge Challenger, they did take her son’s watch and a ring that was given to him by his father. The young man has insisted that as soon as he heals, he plans to return to work.

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