Eight Shots, Seven Wounds, No Gun: Reading the Frames of the Randy Martin Shooting
WE THE PEOPLE INVESTIGATES By Marcus Cole · We The People NewsThe eight-second question
There is a video now. That is the whole difference between the two halves of this case. On May 18, 2026, Galveston Police Officer Joshua Nino de Guzman stopped Randy Martin’s black Lincoln near Avenue O and 55th Street. Four months later, on September 8, a Galveston County grand jury declined to indict him. On September 23, the City of Galveston released the footage — after the vote, not before it. What follows is what the released recording actually contains, measured rather than described: four camera angles and one audio track, read frame by frame, against the account the officer gave investigators.Angle one: the dash camera — the road, and almost nothing of the conversation
The dash camera faces forward from the patrol unit. In the released cut it gives you the traffic stop, the approach, the open driver’s door and the physical encounter from a fixed, single vantage point. It is the clearest picture of where the men were. It is close to useless for what was said — the microphone is not in the street. FOX 26, which published the city’s release, put it plainly in its own caption: “There is no audio in this video of the interaction. The only audio you’ll mainly hear is from inside the vehicle where a K-9 officer was inside.” The dog in the back of the unit is, for long stretches, the loudest thing on the recording.Angle two: the synchronized body camera — the closest and the most blocked
The longer recording that We The People News reviewed — a body-camera file provided to the newsroom, cross-checked against the longer dash-camera recording, which carries a body-camera inset synchronized to the dash feed — is the angle that should settle the case. It is the angle that keeps failing at the worst moment. To be exact about what is what: the inset is in the recording the newsroom holds. The two station cuts that were released to the public and that we measured for this story — KPRC 2’s and FOX 26’s — are dash camera only. We checked. The officer’s chest camera is the closest view of the struggle. It is also repeatedly blocked — by Martin’s shirt, by the officer’s own arms, by both men’s proximity to the car. During the seconds that matter most, the body camera does not hold a continuous, unobstructed view of both of Martin’s hands. Hold that alongside what the officer told the Texas Rangers: that Martin grabbed at his holstered service weapon, and later raised an object the officer believed was a firearm. The Rangers’ file also records that when investigators reviewed the video they believed Martin had reached toward the officer’s waistband and weapon during the struggle. That is a description of a moment the camera cannot fully confirm and cannot fully refute. It is the honest center of this story.Angle three: the K-9 unit’s microphone — the only audio
Because the dash unit’s audio is dominated by the K-9, the encounter’s own soundtrack has to be recovered from the recording itself rather than quoted from a transcript. Running a transient detector over the released footage, the shot string is unmistakable: eight impulses, evenly spaced, in 1.64 seconds.4:10.77 4:11.05 4:11.33 4:11.55 4:11.81 4:12.01 4:12.22 4:12.41 (offsets in seconds)That is a cadence of roughly four rounds per second — a continuous string, not a pause-and-aim. The burned-in overlay on the released recording carries its own clock, and it reads
05/18/26 15:54:01 CDT at one point in the footage and 15:54:08 CDT exactly seven seconds later. Put the two together and the eight rounds run from approximately 15:54:07.8 to 15:54:09.4 CDT. This matters because of what precedes it. According to reporting on the Rangers’ file, the men separate around 3:54:07 — and within about a second the officer backs away and draws. Our own reading of the frames puts the draw at roughly the same instant the first round leaves the barrel. There is no prolonged standoff in the released footage. There is a separation, a draw, and then the string. The Rangers’ investigation determined the officer fired eight rounds. KPRC 2, reviewing the same footage independently, reported “at least eight gunshots can be heard.” The count holds.Angle four: the frames themselves — where the gun is, and where it isn’t
Extracting frames at a quarter-second across the escalation and pulling the same frames up at high magnification, the released picture shows this sequence: Before. The officer and Martin at the open driver’s door. The officer’s right hand is down at his hip and waist. No firearm is visible in it. One of Martin’s hands is visible and open. The separation. The officer comes off the doorway and steps back. The draw. The officer comes up with the handgun. From this frame onward the weapon is plainly visible in his hand for the rest of the sequence — in a two-handed stance, aimed toward Martin at the open door. The string. Martin is down or kneeling at the open driver’s door as the rounds go. The hand that the release actually shows is open and holding nothing. In none of the frames we pulled is a weapon visible in either of Martin’s hands. KPRC 2, reviewing the same footage, noted Martin can be seen with one hand raised in front of his face as the shots are fired. And here is the sentence that has to be in this story, because a version of it will be left out of every version that is not honest: no weapon visible in the frames we reviewed is not the same as the footage proving Martin had nothing in his hands. In the critical second, his far hand, the doorway and the car’s interior are occluded. The released angles do not resolve what that hand was doing. Anyone — on either side — who tells you the video settles that question is telling you something the video does not say.What the record does say
The Rangers’ investigative account, as summarized in reporting by KGTX 7, KPRC 2, Fox 26 and Houston Public Media, records that no firearm belonging to Martin was listed among the evidence recovered from the scene. What the scene inventory did list was a clear plastic container and pieces of hard, rock-like white substance with crushed powdery material — presumptive tests positive, the substance never identified. The passenger, Ashley Nicole Parks, told investigators she believed Martin was throwing drugs from the car. An autopsy found seven gunshot wounds: five to the upper-right portion of Martin’s back, one to his left arm and one to the left side of his chest. The medical examiner classified the death a homicide. Seven wounds from eight rounds, five of them to the back. That is a fact pattern, not a verdict. It is also the thing the grand jury was looking at when it voted.The officer’s record
Chief Doug Balli identified Joshua Nino de Guzman publicly within days of the shooting. He is a two-and-a-half year veteran of the department, and he had been involved in two previous police shootings, cleared of wrongdoing in both, according to the chief. He had also, recently, been named Officer of the Year, for his part in the rescue of a 12-year-old girl. Both of those things belong in the same paragraph, because they are the same man’s record, and because the argument about whether past incidents should carry weight is one the chief himself addressed:“Prior incidents are something people may want to talk about, but every officer-involved shooting has to be reviewed based on the facts of that specific incident… Officer Nino de Guzman, like anyone else, is entitled to a fair investigation based on evidence, not assumptions.” — Chief Doug BalliThe chief is right that each incident stands on its own facts. The public is equally entitled to notice that this incident is not this officer’s first, and that the department’s own internal affairs investigation was still open when the grand jury voted, and that the department said it had not yet received the Rangers’ findings.
The grand jury
The Galveston County District Attorney’s Office presented the case on September 8, 2026. The grand jury reviewed the Rangers’ investigation, including video, and declined to indict. The public did not get the dash-camera footage until September 23. Martin’s family and their attorney, Adalberto Ruiz, were permitted to view the video around September 21 — after the no-bill, and by their own public account only after they had asked. So the sequence is this: the decision was made behind closed doors on evidence the family and the public had not yet been allowed to see. The family then saw it. Then the public saw it. The question that sequence raises is not whether Officer Nino de Guzman should have been indicted. It is whether a system that reaches its conclusion first and releases its evidence second can be expected to produce the same answer for different people.The other case in the same county
We can answer part of that from the inside, because it is not hypothetical for this newsroom. In the publisher’s own case, Galveston County obtained a felony DWI indictment against Matthew Reardon — known to our readers as Don Matthews, the founder and publisher of this outlet — after the government’s own laboratory reported that his blood contained 0.00% alcohol. The state’s own science contradicted the officer’s account that he smelled alcohol on him. He then spent approximately eleven months incarcerated before the prosecution was dismissed. Two different cases. Two different grand juries. Two different years. The same county, the same secrecy, the same asymmetry: the ordinary citizen’s indictment survived a lab result of zero, and the officer’s eight rounds survived everything the public has since been shown. We do not know what was presented to either grand jury. We don’t know which witnesses testified, what the prosecutors said about them, or what was emphasized, minimized or left out. Nobody outside those rooms does. That is precisely the problem.What we are asking for
Not an indictment. Not a predetermined outcome. Randy Martin’s mother, Paula Martin, has put the family’s demand on the record:“No mom or parent should ever have to find out from the news media or from Facebook their child has been murdered.” … “You all say killed, my son was murdered.” — Paula Martin, to FOX 26And on the stop itself, the family’s lawyer is blunt. Civil-rights attorney Adalberto Ruiz: “We don’t know why he stopped Randy Martin. We haven’t been given a reason to date.” Whatever one makes of the word “murdered,” the request underneath it is modest: the evidence, to the fullest extent the law allows, and an explanation of how the decision not to prosecute was reached. The internal affairs investigation remains open. The Rangers’ report has been reported on, but the document itself is not in the public’s hands. The civil-liability question, attorney Ruiz has noted, is untouched by a criminal no-bill. Eight rounds. Seven wounds. Five of them in the back. No gun recovered from the man who was shot. The frames we can see do not tell us everything that happened in that eight-second window. What they do tell us is that the most important seconds are the blurriest ones — and that the people who decided the case got to look at them before the rest of us did. That is not a claim about any individual’s guilt. It is a claim about a process — and about whose account, in Galveston County, a grand jury is willing to take at face value.
Sources: the body-camera file provided to We The People News; the publicly released synchronized dash/body-camera recording (FOX 26 Houston and KPRC 2 / Click2Houston cuts); our own frame-by-frame review and audio-transient analysis of the released footage; reporting on the Texas Rangers investigation by KGTX 7, KPRC 2, FOX 26 Houston and Houston Public Media; Galveston Police Department and Chief Doug Balli statements; public statements by attorney Adalberto Ruiz and Paula Martin. A note on method: the shot timings, the burned-in overlay clock and the frame sequence above were derived from the released footage itself and cross-checked; the overlay text was read from magnified crops. Where the footage does not resolve a question, this story says so rather than filling the gap.
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