CASPER — D.C. Martinez walks the halls at the YMCA with a big smile, stopping to high-five a teen, bending down to talk to a toddler holding his mom’s hand and nodding in recognition of others in the hallway.
His passion for young people nearly oozes from his pores and conversation. And for the past four weeks, his heart has been breaking for Casper’s youth community since the shocking and violent death of 14-year-old Bobby Maher Jr.
Maher was stabbed at Eastridge Mall on April 7 attempting to defend his girlfriend from a pair of 15-year-olds harassing her. Both 15-year-olds have been charged as adults in Maher’s death.
It’s a crime that has stopped the Casper community its tracks while at the same time galvanizing it to act against a youth “fight culture” that, until Maher’s tragic death, bubbled below the notice of most adults.
Martinez, the 44-year-old sports director at the local YMCA, has dedicated his career to these kids. He knows them, like he knew Maher, from all accounts a happy, active teen who loved the color blue, his family and basketball.
That’s why Martinez has launched a new initiative, Blue Heart Collaborative, to unify Casper organizations and agencies to battle the violent and disturbing culture local youth are getting themselves into and driven by social media.
Cycles Repeat, Evolve
Martinez spent his formative years in Las Vegas and said he understands gang culture and the pressures facing the city’s youth.
He’s thankful that the city he’s called home for more than four years still has values that can triumph over evil.
It was Martinez who stood before 4,000 people at David Street Station in downtown Casper at a vigil following Maher’s killing. There he called for the community to come together and work collaboratively to deal with the violence that’s invaded the city through social media.
“What the Lord put on my heart I was very serious about. I see in our community a lot of organizations and a lot of people that care about youth, but currently they are all working independently, and the youth are falling between the cracks,” Martinez said. “I’m big about getting past brands or individual line of thought processes because at the end, we are a community, which means that we have to have a common unity of the different things that we do.”
Blue Heart Collaborative
Blue Heart Collaborative is more than in memory of Maher, who Martinez saw often on the basketball courts at the YMCA.
Martinez said his hope is that the tragedy of the stabbing can motivate and inspire collaborative action to meet youth needs. The first meeting is set for 5 p.m. May 17 at the YMCA for community professionals.
He plans another Community Youth Forum at 5 p.m. June 7 to hear from the young people of Casper about what they need and how adults are failing them, and how to be their champions instead.
“We could put together a ton of great programs, but if we don’t hear from the youth as well, we are spinning our wheels,” he said.
Martinez said he has spoken with representatives from several organizations and youth, and believes there is a lot of motivation to deal with issues such as bullying, suicide prevention, drug and alcohol use, youth homelessness and more.
With the death of Maher still raw, it’s easy to motivate people to address a problem that’s got out of hand to the point that teens are dying. The challenge will be not losing that momentum as time passes.
“Many of them have jumped in and just said, ‘What can we do to be a part of this and to really kind of bring our resources to the table,’” he said.
Martinez said that is why he created the Blue Heart Collaborative Facebook page to be a community bulletin board. The page is meant to be a place where adults and youth can find resources support and a sounding board.
Martinez said he hopes the initiative can spur plans, “and not just complaints,” for finding solutions.
“Everybody can point a finger at a situation and come up with what is wrong with it, but what we really need to do always in life is sit down and throw ideas together of how do we solve that,” he said.
Motivated
Even though he is in his fourth decade of life, Martinez said he continues to be motivated to help young people as YMCA sports director and youth pastor for a church in Mills.
“I’ve always coached and am truly at home was being around kids,” he said. “I’ve always seen the Lord in kids — that honesty, that genuineness, that true belief in something that many adults lose as they get older. I’ve always vowed to protect that for as many kids as I can or as many kids as he blesses me to be around.”
In Casper’s youth, he sees the influence of technology trying to dominate. Martinez said when he grew up there were neighborhood and family factors at work, “but you didn’t have the influences from all over the world at your fingertips on your phone that guide and kind of shift a brain that is very much still developing.”
Because of the influences of his own youth — his dad, coaches and mentors — Martinez said he learned to pray and seek his identity through Jesus Christ. He said what comes through social media robs youth of their individual identities and overwrites a message of “let’s create as much chaos as we can, and that’s how we are going to get follows and likes.”
The goals becomes to “make millions through the most ridiculous video you can come up with rather than try and find who they are and what their purpose is in life,” he said. “Now more than ever, I feel a very strong passion about guiding as many of them into remembering that all those worldly and material things go away and can be taken away very quickly.”
Father And Actor
Martinez said his faith and drive come in a large part from his father, an actor. Tony Martinez was 63 years old when D.C. was born. He played the role of Pepino on television’s “The Real McCoys” in the 1950s.
“When I was young, I grew up until sixth or seventh grade behind the scenes of 'Man of La Mancha,' a Broadway tour. I was homeschooled through much of that time,” Martinez said. “I was hired by the company to get dry cleaning and mail and different things like that for the three lead characters, which were my dad, Raul Julia, the guy that played Gomez in 'The Addams Family', and Sheena Easton.”
Martinez said he made about $300 every two weeks, “but it wasn’t my money.” His dad would send him to museums and historical sites in the different cities that were part of the tour.
In his middle school years, his dad decided to move to Las Vegas and so the family traveled across the country from Florida.
Martinez recalled his father impressing him as boy with his faith during that move. All the family’s possessions were in two vehicles.
“One of them broke down right outside of Texas. He left it there, put a sign on the front of it, signed the title and left it in the glovebox,” Martinez said. “It was like, whoever picks this up, that’s your Lord’s blessing, I have other things ahead of me.
“Sure enough, when we got there is when they called him for the next Broadway tour.”
Community Opportunity
Martinez said he has faith that Maher’s loss can be a springboard for good.
While living in Las Vegas, Martinez was involved in youth ministry and coaching in 2017 when a sniper opened fire out of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 60 people and wounding more than 800 at a concert.
“Prior to that they just very much had their gang neighborhood, ultra-rich and kind-of-middle class” niches and separation in the city, he said.
“After that, I watched the community just come together in a way that was just beautiful, because everybody lost somebody in it,” he said. “The rich community lost people, an officer and a coach that I was close with, we lost. A few people from the more impoverished neighborhood were lost in it, and for the first time everybody dropped all of their nonsense and it was about Vegas strong, right then.’”
Martinez said he hopes the tragic loss of Maher can spur the same kind of response within the Casper community.
“We definitely don’t want to see our family, or another family, go through that same thing, so how about we become Casper strong?” he said. “How about we allow this thing to really move with momentum here and how about we stop this at one.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
