HOUSTON – Police have determined that two shootings in southeast Houston late last year are connected.
Houston police said John Martinez, 45, was attacked in the driveway of his home in the 7000 block of Ashburn about 10 p.m. on Oct. 13.
Martinez parked his pickup truck in his driveway and was walking to his front door when three men confronted him, police said. Martinez was then robbed and fatally shot, investigators said.
"He was the love of my life and now he's gone," Martinez's wife, Norma, said. "It turned our lives upside down. My children don't have a father now. They don't have someone to nurture them, support them, in the way only he could."
Detectives said Martinez's death has been linked to 50-year-old Criss Gerald Knight's death about a month later.
Knight was shot and robbed as he sat in a pickup truck at a stop sign in the 8900 block of Duane on Nov. 8, police said. The shooter left in a black extended cab pickup truck, officials said.
"The tie that links these together is the gun," Officer Mike Miller said. "At this point, we're unclear if they're the same suspects."
Relatives of both victims said they want the killers off the streets so they can't hurt someone else.
"We'd just like to appeal to anyone who knows who may have done this," Knight's brother, Brian, said. "This was a senseless crime."
"These criminals have no right to be out there and be free while we are suffering," Norma Martinez said.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.