STARKVILLE — The defendant was upstairs in her bedroom at the time of the shooting, the defendant treated her daughter with submissive deference and the man the prosecution portrayed as the victim’s Rasputin was a long-time friend who had no interest in changing the victim’s family dynamic, a key part of the motive in the murder, prosecutors say.

The defense argued those points Thursday, the third day of Lydia Martinez’s trial for the 2015 murder of her son-in-law, Manuel Vasquez, in the New Hope home the family shared.

Attorney Arthur Calderon, of Cleveland, began presenting the defense’s case Thursday afternoon and is expected to call two more witnesses, including Christina Martinez, Vasquez’s wife and Lydia’s daughter. Both Lydia and Christina Martinez are accused of shooting Vasquez and burning his body to cover up the murder. Christina pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2019 and is awaiting sentencing.

Calderon called three witnesses Wednesday — Christian Vasquez, 19, the victim’s youngest child, and Paul and Deborah Vega, a couple that befriended the family upon their arrival to New Hope from San Antonio in 2014.

As it was with his older siblings — Alexia Vasquez, 24, and Alec Vasquez, 22 — who testified for the prosecution earlier this week — Christian’s testimony was often heart-wrenching.

The emotions ran highest when he spoke of the night of June 23, 2015, hours before the prosecution believes the murder occurred.

“That was the last time I saw my dad,” Christian Vasquez said.

Christian said on that night, his father had asked him to watch TV with him in the family living room.

“I told him I was tired and didn’t want to watch TV,” he said.

Christian said he instead took a shower and was going to his bedroom, which was located next to his parents’ bedroom downstairs, when his mother, Christina Martinez, told him to sleep upstairs in his grandmother’s bedroom.

Christian said he often slept on a mattress on the floor of his grandmother’s upstairs bedroom.

“I didn’t think anything about it,” he said.

Christian said at some point after he had fallen asleep in his grandmother’s bedroom, he heard a loud noise.

“When I got up to see what had happened, I saw my grandmother and she told me she would check it out and for me to go back to sleep,” he said.

Asked if the defendant was in her bedroom at the time, Christian said she was standing by her bed when he was awakened.

On cross examination, Assistant District Attorney Ben Lang pounced on that part of Christian Vasquez’s testimony.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you saw Lydia (that night)?” Lang asked.

“I did,” Christian responded.

Lang referred to interviews Christian had with law enforcement on July 21 and July 24, 2015, noting that Christian never mentioned that Lydia was upstairs at the time Christian heard the noise that awakened him.

“That’s not in there because you didn’t tell them that,” Lang said.

“I believe I did.”

Lang gave transcripts of the interviews to Christian for him to read, challenging him to find where he had said Lydia was upstairs in her bedroom at the time he heard the banging noise.

After several minutes, Lang resumed his questioning.

“You don’t see it, do you?” he asked.

“No sir,” Christian responded.

“You didn’t say it, did you?” Lang asked.

“I guess not,” Christian responded.

Lang asked a series of rapid-fire questions: “You don’t know what your mom and Lydia talked about, do you? You don’t know what they planned? You don’t know what they did together?”

Christian answered no to each question.

On redirect, however, Christian again insisted his grandmother was with him in her bedroom at the time the loud noise awakened him.

‘The (confession) is a lie’

Paul Vega’s testimony disputed previous testimony by the two older Vasquez children and a recorded interview with the defendant where she said Vega had told Manuel he should forbid his daughter from wearing makeup, cutting her hair or attending the prom, and that sports was a bad influence on his sons.

“What I read in the paper didn’t happen,” Paul Vega said. “I never once talked about makeup or wearing dresses or (Alexia) not going to the prom … . Our relationship wasn’t like that.”

But when Calderon began asking him to recall what Manuel confided to him, the prosecution objected on the grounds of hearsay.

After sending the jury out of the courtroom, Judge Lee Coleman and the attorneys had a lengthy discussion over which conversations Vega could testify to. The judge allowed Calderon to continue questioning Vega outside the presence of the jury.

Vega alleged that Manuel had told him that Christina Martinez and Mary Sanchez, the victim’s mother, had been “embezzling thousands of dollars from (Manuel’s) business and were using witchcraft to turn Manuel back to the way he was before.”

Coleman ruled that the hearsay evidence to establish the victim’s mental state could not be heard by the jury.

When the jury returned, Calderon asked Vega to describe Manuel’s mental state in the days leading up to June 24, 2015, without mention of what the victim told him in their conversations.

“He was very concerned,” Vega said. “He was afraid.”

On cross examination, Lang questioned how well Vega actually knew the defendant.

“I think I do,” Vega said. “I know her character.”

Lang then pointed out that Lydia Martinez had repeatedly accused Vega of assisting her in the murder of her son-in-law, both in a letter characterized as a suicide note/confession and in an interview with law enforcement.

“That letter is a lie,” Vega said. “When I saw it, I said, ‘This sounds like Christina, not Lydia.'”

In her testimony, Deborah Vega said the relationship between Christina and Lydia was dominated by the daughter.

“I could tell it was a strained relationship,” Deborah said, noting that she didn’t see the kind of warmth normally found in a healthy mother-daughter relationship.

“Lydia was always doing what Christina wanted her to do,” Deborah said. “Lydia was always so compliant.”

District Attorney Scott Colom attacked that description during cross examination, noting the defendant’s children had testified that Christina and Lydia had a close relationship.

“You would agree that the children know their mother and grandmother better than you, wouldn’t you?” Colom asked. “(Alexia) said her mom was close to her grandmother and there was no strain in the relationship. Wouldn’t what she said be more reliable?”

“If she was telling the truth, yes,” Deborah said. “But I don’t know if she was under duress to say that.”

The defense is expected to finish its case today.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].