Four years after a West Miami-Dade wife claimed her husband was being “aggressive and scary” when she shot and killed him, she has been charged with first-degree murder.
According to the arrest warrant by Miami-Dade police Detective Michael Brajdic, Aimee Martinez’s story about why and how she shot Osmanny Montano crumbled under the weight of the evidence. As weighty as any of that evidence: a pillow.
After Martinez’s arrest last Thursday, she pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. The 35-year-old remains in Miami-Dade Corrections custody with no bond granted, customary for a first-degree murder charge.
Osmanny Montano was 34 years old.
Martinez’s story about shots fired in the condo
County marriage license records say a deputy clerk married Montano and Martinez in Coral Gables on Oct. 18, 2018. They’d been married eight days shy of five months when Martinez called 911 around 7:30 on a Sunday morning.
Martinez “advised that her husband attacked her,” and she “shot him,” the arrest warrant form said. “She advised that her husband got up after he was shot and came at her again, at which time she shot him a second time. [Martinez] advised the 911 operator that her husband was ‘shot in the neck and under the ribs,’ and that her husband was located “on the stairs.’ “
Martinez met the first Miami-Dade officers outside Unit No. I-6 at 4730 SW 67th Ave., in the Oasis Condominium Townhouse Complex. Montano was on the stairwell, shot in the left chest and left neck as Martinez had said. She said the gun, a Smith & Wesson M&P .40 caliber, was hers.
Investigators later determined the couple’s 2-year-old son had been on the same room when Martinez shot Montano.
Martinez said the couple were sleeping in different rooms because Montano, a U.S. Army veteran, was dealing with a post-traumatic stress disorder episode. She told police Montano came upstairs and began screaming at her. Upon the argument heading downstairs, she said, Montano began “hitting himself and threw keys at her.”
She told police that’s when she went back upstairs, got a gun from a clothes basket next to her bed and “concealed it under her buttocks.” Martinez said when Montano came in and figured out she had a gun under her, he tried to get it. She said he got on top of her and, from a distance of no more than two feet, she shot him twice.
“[Martinez] acknowledged that although [Montano] was ‘aggressive and scary,’ he had never really hit her before,” the arrest report said.
The shooting scene and the investigation
Investigators saw a pillow on the bedroom floor between the bed and a closet, near the hamper where Martinez said she got the gun.
“No defects were observed to the pillow at first observation, but upon unfolding the pillow, burning and soot was observed in the center portion of the pillow along with a projectile hole,” the arrest affidavit said. “Upon turning the pillow over, a hole was observed on the opposite side. There was no observable blood on the pillow.”
Two casings were found. One was near the headboard of the bed. The second was inside the bedroom closet, the door of which had a projectile strike mark.
“There was no blood pooling or blood spatter located in the area of the pillow, wall, closet door or area of the bed in which [Martinez] claimed to be seated at the time [Montano] was shot,” the affidavit said.
Chief Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Kenneth Hutchins noted there was no soot, which is left by a close range shooting, or strippling, which is the burning of Montano’s clothes or skin and another sign of a shooting from close range.
After Miami-Dade police firearms analyst John Mancini tested the gun by firing into several pillows, investigators concluded the burn patterns matched the pattern from the pillow being folded over the gun when it was fired. When asked about the hole in the pillow, Martinez denied shooting through a pillow and that nobody in the home had shot through a pillow.
“[Martinez’s] statement, in which she claims she shot [Montano] while he was on top of her, attempting to gain control of her firearm is completely refuted by the physical evidence,” the affidavit said.