Lydia Martinez thought the popping noise was a firework the night her daughter, she claims, shot Manuel Vasquez.
She said she got out of bed and went into the hallway of the New Hope home where she lived with her daughter, Christina Martinez Vasquez, her son-in-law Manuel Vasquez and three grandchildren. In the hallway, she saw her grandson Alec, 17, who had gotten out of bed to investigate the loud popping sounds. She told him to go back to bed and then walked downstairs, where her daughter and son-in-law had their bedroom.
“I remember going downstairs and I didn’t see anything,” Lydia told The Dispatch on Friday. “So then I went back upstairs and then I heard the same popping sound again.”
Lydia said she then saw Christina coming up the stairs, holding a box.
Lydia recognized it — it was the box Manual Vasquez would give her when he and Christina were heading to San Antonio on business. He would want her to have it because it contained his gun. He would leave it for her for protection, Lydia said.
She said that when her daughter handed it to her, though, it felt empty.
Lydia said Christina told her to take the box upstairs and put it in her room for safekeeping and to meet her back downstairs. Lydia left the box under a dresser in her bedroom and went back downstairs to her waiting daughter.
Lydia said that’s when Christina told her that she’d shot Manuel to death.
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The murder occurred June 24, according to the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office.
Eventually, Christina Martinez, 38, was charged with murder. She remains in the Lowndes County Adult Detention Center on a $500,000 bond.
Lydia Martinez, 57, was arrested, too. She is facing a charge of accessory after the fact to murder. Her bond was set at $500,000 originally but was later reduced to $30,000. Lydia Martinez’s sister helped pay for her release Friday. She had been in custody three months.
After being released, Lydia, before going to Colorado to stay with family, sat down with The Dispatch.
During the two-plus-hour interview, she recounted her version of the events surrounding the death of 40-year-old Manuel Vasquez.
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Lydia Martinez said Christina, after Manuel had been shot, began threatening her.
“She started telling me if I even called the cops or told anybody…that she would take my life…that she was going to take the grandkids’ lives,” Lydia said.
Lydia said that while she stood in a downstairs bedroom with her daughter, Christina pointed the gun upstairs, to where the three children were, and said, “One, two, three.”
Lydia said then the gun was pointed at her.
“I just kept telling her, ‘Don’t take the grandkids’ lives, please, don’t,'” Lydia said. “And she told me, ‘You have to do what I tell you.'”
Lydia said Christina took her to the bedroom where Manuel was in bed in his underclothes. Blood covered the sheets. Lydia said her daughter ordered her to help her put Manuel’s body in a closet.
The two women dragged the body into a bedroom closet. Lydia said she was telling Christina to call authorities.
Lydia said the closet’s floor was covered in plastic bags. The two women then went into the kitchen where Christina made Lydia a cup of coffee, according to Lydia.
“I remember drinking the coffee and the whole room started spinning,” Lydia said.
She now believes her daughter drugged her.
“She helped me to the couch,” Lydia said. “I couldn’t even think or move — I was numb all over.”
Lydia said Christina then went into the bedroom and began cleaning. Lydia said Christina used bleach and vinegar to clean the mattress and carpets. Lydia said she remembers the smell.
Lydia said Christina told her to help pull up carpet.
“I kept telling her, ‘I can’t Christina,'” Lydia said. “She just kept threatening me with the children over and over…I was trying to protect my children, my grandchildren.”
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Lydia said that the next morning, when the children woke, Christina sent them to GameStop to get a new Xbox and video games. Lydia said that after they were gone, Christina told her to help get Manuel’s body out of the closet and into the garage.
Lydia said she remembers falling over at one point. There was blood everywhere, she said.
Christina had already laid a blue tarp behind the trash cans in the garage, according to Lydia. They left the body under the tarp, Lydia said.
Lydia said the cleaning continued — the hallway, the carpet in the bedroom, the garage floor.
Lydia said Christina called the children and told them to come in through the front door when they returned because there was a gasoline spill in the garage.
She said Christina ordered her to use a hose to push the cleaning fluids into the grass.
“I just stayed out there for a while, just watering the flowers…I wanted to just run,” Lydia said. “Then I feared for my kids because if I run, she’s going to kill my grandchildren, I know she is.”
Lydia said that after she went back into the home, Christina gave her another cup of coffee. Lydia said she blacked out after that.
According to an affidavit from the case filed in Lowndes County Justice Court, Christina went to Lowe’s in Columbus and ordered a new master bedroom carpet at that time.
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Lydia said that that night Christina told her they had to burn Manuel’s body.
Lydia said Christina dragged Manuel’s body to the driveway, near the basketball goal where her grandsons, Alec and Christian, played basketball. Lydia said Christina poured gasoline on the body, lit a match and threw it on the body. Lydia said her daughter kept adding gasoline until the body was engulfed in flames.
“She was like a madwoman,” Lydia said.
Lydia said she tried to tell Christina she was too tired to stay outside any more, but Christina ordered her to hold a huge bucket. Using a brown blanket and comforter to wrap her hands in, Christina shoved the body into the bucket, according to Lydia. Then, Lydia said, Christina added logs and gasoline and kept the flames burning.
Lydia said the body burned for three days.
“I kept telling her, ‘Christina, this is so wrong. This is so wrong,'” Lydia told The Dispatch. “She would just tell me, ‘It’s not. He had to be out of my life.’ She didn’t want him no more.”
Authorities have not released a possible motive in the slaying.
Lydia said that when the body had completely burned, Christina put the ashes in trash bags and left them for garbage collectors to pick up.
The remaining ashes, according to Lydia, were thrown into the woods by the Vasquez house.
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Vasquez was officially reported missing to LCSO on July 13.
On July 22, local authorities, along with officials from the state Crime Lab and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, found human remains in Manuel Vasquez’s yard. The remains had been burned, according to Lowndes County Coroner Greg Merchant. On Oct. 21, Merchant reported that the state Crime Lab in Jackson had confirmed that the remains belonged to Manuel Vasquez.
Between Vasquez’s death and the discovery of the remains, Lydia said she was a “bundle of nerves.” She said Christina told everyone — friends of the family and LCSO authorities — that Manuel had gone on a retreat and would be back on July 13.
On Saturday, The Dispatch spoke with Alexia Vasquez, the couple’s 19-year-old daughter.
“Of course, you wouldn’t think that your mom would be telling you lies,” Alexia said. “And I believed everything she said when she said he went on a retreat. I questioned it at first because I was like, ‘Well, why didn’t dad tell us?’ But then, you know, that’s my mom…and I just believed.”
The family took a brief trip to San Antonio for Christina to work at Air Masters — the company the family owns — and for Alec to go to a doctors appointment. Lydia said that while they were in San Antonio, Christina drove some of the remaining bloodied carpet to dumpsters behind an apartment complex during the night.
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After the family’s return from San Antonio, authorities opened a missing person’s case on Manuel Vasquez. Lydia claims Christina told her detectives wanted to talk to Lydia and that she was going to drive her to their office.
“I thought, ‘Here’s my chance to tell them the truth’,” Lydia said.
But they did not go to LCSO offices. Lydia said Christina instead took her to the parking lot of Food Giant and told Lydia she had to take the blame.
“She told me to write a note,” Lydia said. “I told her, ‘No, Christina, you know I didn’t kill him.’ And she told me, ‘You have to take the blame because my children need me.'”
Lydia claims she does not remember writing a letter. She claims Christina must have drugged her and made her write what the letter said.
The Dispatch does not have a copy of the alleged letter.
“I remember getting the pen and I just started writing, but I don’t remember what I wrote,” Lydia said.
Lydia claims that after that, Christina helped her to her bedroom and forced her to take some pills. Lydia said she could not lift herself off of the bed after that. Lydia said she believes the pills may have been prescription pain medication.
Lydia claims Christina eventually came to the room and told her to drink liquid she brought in a mason jar. Lydia said it burned her throat and made her vomit.
“I just remember waking up in the hospital,” Lydia said.
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When authorities came to the Vasquez home on July 22, the day after human remains were found in the yard, Lydia Martinez was discovered upstairs in her bedroom unconscious, apparently having tried to commit suicide.
She was transported to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle where doctors believed she had tried to kill herself by taking pills, drinking anti-freeze and cutting her wrist.
Lydia told The Dispatch she did not try to kill herself.
Alexia Vasquez was at the house on July 22, the day her grandmother was taken to the hospital. Alexia said detectives had come to talk to Christina. Alexia thinks they wanted Christina to go to the sheriff’s office for questioning. Christina went upstairs to tell Lydia where she was going and supposedly found her unconscious, according to Alexia.
“She just ran downstairs and told the detectives, ‘Help, my mother is not breathing,’ or something like that,” Alexia said.
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Lydia, in her interview with The Dispatch, claimed that by not telling authorities about what transpired in the house she protected her three grandchildren. She said she still loves her daughter, but that she “washes my hands of her.”
In an email to The Dispatch, Alexia, who is living with family in San Antonio, said she and her brothers love Lydia Martinez and now believe she was protecting them from their mother.
Alexia also asked that her siblings’ privacy be respected.
“There’s been comments and questions about if our father was a part of the cartel or something like that,” she said. “And we just want those false accusations to stop flying around because none of them are true and it just hurts us more than anything.”
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In addition to murder charges, Christina Martinez is facing charges of domestic violence aggravated assault for allegedly attempting to poison Lydia with anti-freeze. Both Christina Martinez and Lydia Martinez have trials slated to begin in Lowndes County Circuit Court in February.
Lydia Martinez’s court appointed attorney, Carrie Jourdan, did not respond to messages from The Dispatch on Friday.
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