Former Tampa Bay Rays prospect Brandon Martin has been sentenced to life in prison without parole after he was convicted of killing three people with a baseball bat.
He avoided the death penalty on Thursday as a Riverside County Superior Court jury returned their verdict.
The same jury that found Martin guilty of first-degree murder in the September 2015 killings of his father, Michael Martin, uncle Ricky Andersen and alarm installer Barry Swanson had to choose between the death penalty, sought by the prosecution, or life in prison without parole.
Defense attorneys argued Martin had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in January 2013 and remains untreated.
Kevin Beecham, one of the prosecutors, blamed Martin, not mental illness.
“You have to remember these are the choices Brandon made”, Beecham said during his closing statement.
“He chose to sign a $860,000 contract, to rent a mansion, to do drugs, to party incessantly, to refuse to listen to his family”.
Martin’s brother, Sean, testified that his brother’s behavior grew worrisome in following years.
It started with being defensive about not working out at his rented mansion in Yorba Linda, then spiraled into Martin laughing for no reason, showing “extreme paranoia”, hallucinating and believing relatives who weren’t present, even dead ones, were speaking to him.
“It was a ticking time bomb,” Sean Martin said.
Martin’s behavior became violent, including punching his wheelchair-bound father in the face, choking his mother and brandishing scissors at her.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” his mother, Melody, testified.
“We locked our doors. We would hear him yelling. We heard him arguing. But nobody was there”.
“The next day we’d see punches in the walls in his bedroom”.
Prosecutors portrayed Brandon Martin’s behavior as fueled by drug use.
That included a former roommate of Martin, who believes his friend suffers from serious mental health problems, testifying they smoked marijuana together in addition to doing cocaine.
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