Bail set at 50k for man accused of hitting vehicle in Henderson road rage incident
A Henderson judge set bail at $50,000 for a man police said was captured on video “intentionally striking another vehicle” in an alleged road rage incident.
Charlie Martinez, 32, was arrested and booked on suspicion of multiple crimes, including battery with a deadly weapon, burglary of a motor vehicle, and coercion with force.
According to the Henderson Police Department, officers responded to the intersection of Boulder Highway and Gibson Road in response to a crash at about 11 a.m. Tuesday. When they arrived, police said, they learned that Martinez had been driving a truck and intentionally struck another vehicle.
During Martinez’s pretrial hearing on Thursday, Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Scow, who appeared on Zoom, called the incident a case of “completely unprovoked” road rage.
“[Martinez] attacked one man, and then, shortly after, ran his vehicle into another vehicle driven by another victim multiple times, putting her vehicle into the ditch, and then didn’t stop there,” Scow said. “He continued to try to get inside her vehicle, breaking into it. The violence in this case can’t be overstated.”
Police said in an emailed statement that one person had been transported to a local hospital with unknown injuries, and another was treated on scene by the Henderson Fire Department. By Wednesday, an Instagram video of the crash, in which a shirtless man, purportedly Martinez, climbed onto the hood of a vehicle and tried to break its windshield, had amassed thousands of views and likes.
The video’s caption said that bystanders managed to talk Martinez down from the vehicle before he started attacking them.
Scow added that Martinez had six misdemeanor convictions, mainly traffic offenses, and one failure to appear for court. He requested that Martinez be put on high-level electronic monitoring if he makes bail and is released.
Martinez’s public defender, Allison Coombs, argued that electronic monitoring would not work for her client, as he had been living in his truck, which was “no longer accessible” after the crash. Coombs said that Martinez had acted “wildly out of character” during the incident.
“I know he does have significant ties to the community. He has no significant criminal history, just the one failure to appear. So I honestly don’t understand exactly what happened here,” Coombs said.
Before setting Martinez’s bail, Justice of the Peace Sandy DiGiacomo said he had attacked three people and was “clearly a danger to the community.”
“The defendant attacked them with no motivation. He did not know the parties,” DiGiacomo said. “They did not do anything to him.”
Contact Akiya Dillon at adillon@reviewjournal.com.
