Yesica Martinez’s family wants answers regarding the young woman’s mysterious death and the Dallas Police Department’s failure to locate her body following a car crash.
Martinez seemingly went missing in the early morning hours of Friday, March 17. Her vehicle was found crashed on the North Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, but police were unable to locate her body near the crash site.
It was Martinez’s family that found her, her brother, Dario Manzo, told The Dallas Express. Her body was near the opposite side of the service road below the highway, inside the fenced-in area of a nearby vacant property that used to be the Cabana Motor Hotel.
“I walked maybe 15 feet [from where Martinez’s car had crashed]. My sister, she looks over the fence, and the first thing she sees is her legs. She just screams and says, ‘She’s here,’” Manzo recounted to The Dallas Express. “I did what I could and hopped that fence, and I ran up to her body … and just dropped to my knees.”
Manzo, who lives in California, flew to Dallas on Friday after he learned Martinez was missing. He and his family found her body on Sunday, two days after she had seemingly disappeared from the scene of her car accident.
Upon discovering Martinez, Manzo and his family called the police, who made their way to the 800 block of North Stemmons Freeway on the southbound service road around 9 a.m.
According to Manzo, DPD had no answers for him and his family, both at that moment and in the days leading up to the discovery of her body. As it turns out, they had apparently contacted DPD days earlier to report her missing after police could not find her around the crash site.
“We were calling them for days — for days — asking them to check the hospitals. I mean, if they would have just [taken] the time to just search the area, they would have found her,” Manzo told The Dallas Express. “They did absolutely nothing to find my sister. It took us to fly out here and personally go out there and search for her. … It feels like we’re living in a nightmare. She was our baby sister.”
The Dallas Express reached out to DPD for information about the matter.
“Martinez was reported as a ‘want to locate’ the evening of March 17, 2023,” Public Information Officer Michael Dennis told The Dallas Express. “This is currently being investigated as an unexplained death.”
Martinez’s husband, Mario Morales, told FOX 4 that she had just started a waitressing job on Thursday and had messaged him on her way home from her shift that evening. She never made it.
A 911 call about a car crash came in around 1 a.m. on Friday, according to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. On that call, Martinez could apparently be heard arguing with an unknown man.
“You could hear her asking for help,” Manzo told FOX 4.
Martinez’s personal belongings had also been left inside her crashed vehicle, including her glasses and phone.
“She can’t see without her glasses. There was no reason for her to be like, ‘Oh, let me set my glasses down so I can walk around blind.’ That’s just not logical for her to do,” said Adriana Diaz, Martinez’s sister, in a previous statement to FOX 4.
Martinez’s husband explained that the family told police that things just didn’t add up.
“And we told them, given the circumstances of what happened, we didn’t believe she just left,” Morales said to the local outlet.
Family members are also baffled by how she ended up in the ditch behind such a sizable fence, one that FOX 4 reports is patrolled by security and that first responders had to cut through to get to her body.
Not to mention, the fenced-in area where Martinez was found is below the freeway where she crashed and across three lanes of the North Stemmons Freeway southbound service road.
The circumstances surrounding the 25-year-old’s death remain unclear, and the Dallas County Medical Examiner has yet to determine a cause of death.
“I just feel frustration and anger because maybe if [the police] would have tried a little harder, we could probably still have my sister here,” Manzo told The Dallas Express as he fought back tears.
Martinez is survived by her 1-year-old daughter and husband.
I used to joke about how worthless the police are at protecting citizens. I said: “cops are only good at drawing outlines around a dead body”. Well, looks like they can’t even do that right anymore.
If she was alive after the accident (by evidence of being heard on the 911 call), then she was either murdered by who she was arguing with, or she was possibly the victim of a hit and run. Whatever happened to her the police should have done a better job investigating to start with. Dallas police are very slow to respond to non life threatening situations. When they finally arrived and she wasn’t there, they probably assumed she just got a ride. But, when she was reported missing, they should have stepped up their investigation.