COUNCIL BLUFFS — Five years in prison? Call it a bum deal.
Of the three men involved in the burglary of a farmhouse near Malvern, Iowa — interrupted when its lone resident confronted them with a shotgun — the only one going to prison is the burglar the farmer shot, in his "posterior," as the local sheriff put it.
That's because Miguel Martinez of Council Bluffs was the ringleader and the one breaching the doorway when he was confronted by farmer Don Hopp, said prosecutor Tricia McSorley.
"Martinez was kind of the mastermind of this whole deal," McSorley said.
Martinez, 31, was sentenced Tuesday in Mills County District Court to a five-year prison term for attempted burglary in the Aug. 17 incident.
Also sentenced Tuesday was Patrick Hover, 19, said to be the trio's driver, to two years of supervised probation, including a stay in a Council Bluffs halfway house, for a guilty plea to second-degree burglary. He was given a suspended prison sentence of 10 years.
The third burglar, Yosvani Galindo, 33, of Omaha pleaded guilty in December to second-degree burglary and also received a suspended 10-year prison sentence with two years of supervised probation.
McSorley said the trio had been smoking methamphetamine in the countryside near Malvern when they hatched a plot to burglarize a nearby farmhouse.
"They were high as kites when they did this," McSorley said.
In an interview Monday at his Council Bluffs home, Martinez — a man with a teardrop tattoo under his right eye and a "420" tattoo on his right wrist — said he and the other two were only looking for a place to stay overnight.
"I just thought it was an abandoned house," Martinez told The World-Herald. He said he did not actually enter the home, getting no farther than the door.
"I shined my flashlight in, and that's when I saw the barrel of that gun."
He ran. He heard the gun's roar. He hid in a beanfield, not initially realizing he had been hit.
Martinez was nabbed about an hour later, treated for his wounds at Jennie Edmundson Hospital in Council Bluffs and jailed. Most of the pellets hit him in the back, he said, not his rear end.
Hopp, 66, has described the shooting as an accident. He said he was outside his home after confronting the burglars when he fell, discharging the weapon. In December, a grand jury decided not to indict him.
The day before he was sentenced, Martinez said he worried about what would happen to his wife and seven children if he was imprisoned. If he had that night to live over again, his actions would have been different.
"Wouldn't even try to get in the house," he said. "I guess I would have just kept on driving."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1310, andrew.nelson@owh.com
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