Biography
Mario Martinez was one of Los Siete de la Raza, a group of young Latino men from the Mission District of San Francisco charged in the May 1, 1969 death of plainclothes police officer Joseph Brodnik. Brodnik and his partner had confronted the group over a suspected burglary when a struggle broke out and Brodnik was fatally shot; the defense argued the fatal shot came from the gun of his own partner during the scuffle. Mario Martinez was arrested and jailed pending trial, and the case became a major cause of the Bay Area Chicano and Latino movement, which built a defense committee, the newspaper Basta Ya, and community survival programs modeled on the Black Panthers. After a lengthy trial, the defendants were acquitted in 1970.