A Bronx family is searching for answers after an 18-year-old teen fell to his death off an elevated parkway near the George Washington Bridge after abandoning a car he’d allegedly used to evade police.
Cops said Cesar Martinez jumped out of a stolen vehicle near Broadway and W. 207th St. in Inwood, where it broke down, and sprinted along the Henry Hudson Parkway toward the bridge in the early hours of Sunday.
The fleeing suspect apparently misjudged a gap as he fled and plunged to his death onto Riverside Drive below, police said.
His family is struggling to make sense of it all.
“For me, it’s very hard, it’s very painful,” said Xiomara Morel, 41, Martinez’s mother. “Sometimes I realize what happened, but at the same time, I don’t believe it happened to me. I’m confused. I don’t know. I have so many questions.”
Officers from the Bronx’s 52nd Precinct tried to pull the young man over for driving in a stolen car at about 1:30 a.m., cops said.
After Martinez fell, medics took him to Harlem Hospital, where he died of his injuries, officials said.
But everything that happened in between, Morel said, is a mystery.
“The last thing that my son said to the police was, ‘I’m not going back to jail,’” Morel said. “The detective told me. How, if he’s running, he’s going to say to the police, ‘I’m not going back to jail?’ For me, it does not make sense.”
Relatives admitted that Martinez had previous run-ins with the law, but they said he was putting his criminal life behind him.
“He had his history, but he was definitely changing his ways,” said Xihara Martinez, 19, Martinez’s sister. “He was staying out of trouble. He was outside less. He was not doing the same things he was doing before. He was genuinely becoming a better man.”
Xihara said her brother’s death grew even more confusing when she received a text from a girl who said she had been in the car with him.
“We was getting some food and then all of the sudden cops started chasing us,” the girl said in the text. “When we was on the highway, he made a wrong turn, hit a pole, then the cops hit the car. Then he ran, I don’t know where he went.”
The friend said she was arrested and released.
The family said they don’t know whose car Martinez was in.
Martinez lived with his mother, sister and a 7-year-old brother. He went to Bronx Collegiate Academy, but did not finish, his sister said. She added that he liked to fix and ride motorcycles and scooters.
“I still can’t believe this. I’m like a walking zombie,” Xihara said. “I’m getting things done because I have to, but on the inside there’s like nothing. It happened so sudden. We saw him sitting with his friends where he always chilled at like an hour prior.”
The family’s Ring camera last caught Martinez around 11 p.m., when “he was good, he was playing with my dog,” Xihara said. “He was like, ‘Bye.’”
Morel said she spoke to her son the evening of his death when he was sitting on a stoop down the block with some friends.
“He said, ‘’I’m gonna be here like 10 more minutes and then come to the house,’” she recounted. “And then after that…”
Morel said that Martinez, despite his setbacks, always managed to put family first.
“He was always helping me to pick up his younger brother from the after-school program everyday,” the grieving parent said, noting that he worked with her own mother in a beauty salon. “He helped my mother to cashier and to clean the salon. He told me that he wanted to be an engineer to work in the elevators.”
Martinez’s girlfriend, Kimberly Martinez — who said it was a coincidence that they had same last name — described the young man as devoted to his mother.
“He would never hide anything from his mom,” she said. “He would tell his mom everything. Good news, bad news — he would just go straight to his mom. His mom was his world.”
