Boulder – A man accused of a violent, racially motivated attack will face trial, a county judge decided Thursday.
Phillip Martinez, 38, faces charges of second-degree assault and ethnic intimidation in an alleged attack in June on a black University of Colorado student, who was knocked unconscious and suffered a broken jaw.
Andrew Sterling, the victim, told the court Thursday that surgical wires holding his jaw together were removed last week but that a titanium plate held in place by four screws will remain for the rest of his life.
As Sterling testified before Boulder County Court Judge David Archuleta, Martinez sat in a hallway out of sight but where he could hear.
Sterling told the court he would not be able to identify his attacker, and defense attorney Keith Pope didn’t want the victim to see Martinez sitting at the defense table in a jail jumpsuit and in handcuffs for fear of a future “tainted” identification.
Sterling recounted the early morning of June 3, when he was attacked while walking home with a friend after having about four drinks at a Boulder bar.
The pair were near the intersection of Arapahoe Road and 11th Street when a man in a passing van yelled racial slurs and profanities out the window, Sterling said.
The van pulled into a grocery-store parking lot, and the slurs continued.
“I was offended, angry and a little scared,” Sterling recalled.
He yelled back at the van.
“If you have something to say, get out and say it,” Sterling recounted.
One man from the van was trying to defuse the situation, Sterling said, when he was hit in the jaw from the side.
Sterling got up, but a second punch put him back down, he said.
Two passing pedestrians told investigators they heard “numerous” or “several” racial slurs before the attack, according to court testimony.
But Pope said the witnesses heard slurs in the hip-hop music playing in the van. Earlier in the hearing, four friends of Martinez, including two black men, testified they do not know Martinez to be a racist.
“I don’t think he has a racist bone in his body,” said Harold “Hal” Miller, 75, a jail chaplain who met Martinez in the Boulder County Jail in 1995.
Martinez did not testify. His arraignment is scheduled for Sept. 9. The judge declined to reduce his bail, which is set at $50,000.
The accounts of four men who were in the van with Martinez differ on what happened, according to police testimony.
Police said the driver of the van told them that Martinez never used any racial slurs and he hit Sterling in self-defense.
But two other men in the van told investigators that Martinez did scream out slurs and vulgarities, and that he “sucker-punched” Sterling.
After hearing more than five hours of testimony and going over the background materials on Martinez, Archuleta described him as a “very dangerous person.”
He said: “This was a violent, unprovoked attack.”
Staff writer Kieran Nicholson can be reached at 303 820-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
