The Day a Forgotten Man Fell—And Changed Me Forever

The prison guard didn’t see the fire extinguisher smash into the side of his head. He just went down in the July sun. He looked up from the heel-packed red dirt of the Wyoming prison yard at three prisoners. They fell on him and he disappeared beneath their orange jumpsuits. He fought with his fists and feet as the prisoners muzzled him, choked him, punched him. Red dust rose around them. Half a minute into the hot struggle one of the prisoners shoved a dull shank deep into the guard’s gasping lungs.

Prison sirens began their long high-pitched wail.

The small town of Rawlins, just a mile away and across Interstate 80, heard the warning. Another escape? What was happening?

The murderers jumped a fence and fell over each other into a laundry van. Keys were in the ignition. The convicts began driving the van wildly around a small parking lot. They were screaming. One was pointing out a window away from the gray buildings of the Wyoming State Penitentiary and to the sagebrush hills. The one behind the wheel was delirious. There was nowhere to go.

Gunfire from prison towers began poking holes in the white van. Windows were shattering from .30-caliber bullet impacts.

There was no way out. The convicts tried anyway. The van turned toward a perimeter fence. Tires tossed gravel. The van picked up speed across the parking lot and smashed into the first corrugated metal fence. But this wasn’t a Hollywood movie. The van didn’t break through with chain links flying and tires squealing. The laundry van simply came to a crashing halt as the convicts were tossed against the dashboard and into broken glass.

They weren’t screaming when gun barrels were thrust into the van’s shot-out windows. The prisoners just gave up. They didn’t want to die.

When word rushed across I-80 to the town of Rawlins no one could believe that anyone, not even three convicts, could have killed Wayne Martinez. Wayne was tough and brave. He was good, so good. Why would anyone want to harm Wayne?

When I asked about Wayne during those early days of shock and horror men simply said he made them want to be better men. Women said they wished more men had his charm, his goodness, his sense of honor. Though lofty things are often said about the ones we lose, everyone who knew Wayne had this sincerity in their washed-out eyes, in their hallowed-out voices you didn’t doubt, not even in the private corners of your mind. When asked to explain some would list superlatives, others would tell stories about how he’d helped them and, even as he did, never seemed to judge them. Finally, as their voices faded into remembrances they’d say they just didn’t have the words to explain about Wayne.

That wasn’t enough, not nearly. There were answers here. Real answers to what a man should try to be were within reach. As a reporter for the town’s newspaper, as a man in his twenties trying to become something, I wanted those answers.

So I drove my Jeep down a dusty road and stopped alongside a green chain-link fence that kept the neighborhood dogs out of a quarter-acre lot. Inside the fence were a hundred people in dark suits and dresses. They were awkwardly holding paper cups in the summer sun and trying to speak with swollen tongues. Down the brown street were more run-down, single-story homes all lined up like eggs in a carton on the wrong side of the Union Pacific tracks.

I waded into the mourners asking questions. His mother stepped forward. She was gray and frail, wearing a long black dress, and her shoulders were badly slouched from the weight of grief. I told her I needed a photo of Wayne for the newspaper. She led me into the single-story home. She picked up a silver picture frame from a table among dozens of other photos in frames of all shapes and sizes. With all the bones in her small hands trembling she carefully removed the photograph from the frame.

She handed me the photo as carefully as an archeologist would an ancient artifact. I thanked her and promised to be careful scanning the photo for the newspaper. Before I turned away her half-dead voice whispered something through a black veil I’ll never forget: “He was everything a man should be.” She was pointing with her eyes at the photo. I followed her gaze and was drawn into Wayne’s face.

They’d all been saying Wayne was a manly man, a man people respected, that he’d gone down unarmed but fighting three prisoners. But the man in the photo was average size. He had a common face in a community of Mexican immigrants. He was standing, smiling in his uniform but there was nothing about his eyes, jaw line, or size that made him memorable. He wouldn’t stand out even in this town of 7,500 residents that sits like an oasis of green cottonwood trees and fading, wind-blown buildings in an ocean of sagebrush and sun-hardened red hills.

I kept looking at the photo as I took it to the newspaper office and scanned it. I came back with the newspaper’s city reporter, Max. Together we interviewed his family, friends, his priest, his neighbors, and later his colleagues at the prison. The more we heard the more we wanted to know. We were investigating what a man is made of. And there were real answers.

Wayne, they said, was raising his five young children, one boy and four girls, and loving his wife and was so perfectly happy people were drawn to him. When they stopped to warm themselves in the glow of his charm they found manly humility, confidence, and strength. They found a pure and clean man who made them want to be better men. One woman said he’d helped put a roof on her house. A friend said Wayne would break up fights by stepping between combatants. A few added that his clear eyes and calm voice would disarm people and soon have them shaking hands. They said he did everything right but that he wasn’t weak. They said he was a high school sports star and an artist and managed to be both with no contradiction of stereotypes.

They were clearly all in awe of Wayne.

Yet he was so common looking. He made a barely livable wage as a prison guard at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. He lived on the poorer side of the tracks. He was only 27 years old.

His mother pointed to his art, to oil paintings, to a passion that took him to art school in Chicago. She explained that he left art school when he ran out of money, when his family needed him home seven years before.

Max and I followed his trail to the Wyoming State Penitentiary, buildings surrounded by razor-wire fences and hidden from the interstate by sagebrush hills. A grizzled prison guard with gray hair just showing beneath his prison guard hat walked us to the spot where Wayne had been killed in the grassless red dirt of the prison yard. He explained that this was where Wayne had been beaten and stabbed to death.

We asked about Wayne and he said Wayne had done everything right. He was a man prisoners respected. He was fair but not soft. He walked the line just as a man should. “Those who are too cruel to the prisoners always get in the end,” said the guard. “Those who are too soft lose respect and so get it too. But those who walk the line by treating the prisoners with justice and dignity do fine. Wayne walked the line better than any man I’ve ever known. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to me. It could have happened to the warden.”

That evening we briefly met the three murderers in a hospital room. All three were looking at the cream tiled floor. They were drooped over like dying flowers. At first glance they seemed to be sulking, maybe even loaded down with sorrow. One was in a hospital bed. The other two were chained to chairs. To me, they looked like kids in the principal’s office—sorry only because they’d been caught. The cops around them were strutting with square backs and anger in their eyes and the abrupt, stiff movements of robots. The cops pushed us away, “No press, no press.”

Later, at the trial, we saw the murderers take an usual defense. They claimed killing was their right. They said they followed a Norse religion that required them to slay their enemies and Wayne, being a guard, was one of their enemies. They’d even taken Viking names—Thor, Vidar, and Rolf. Yeah, their lawyers never had a chance defending them. One would get the death penalty, the other two life in prison.

Long, long ago, according to the ancient creed “might makes right,” the convicts would have been men. Today we know justice nor manliness can be achieved by brute force. We know that justice and honor exist apart from brute force. Today we know in our bones these murderers behaved as animals, not as men. We know force is only manly when it is right.

So Max and I pitied these brutal and confused men and hoped they’d pay and be redeemed, but we were much more interested in Wayne. He represented something we were trying to learn, to be, to understand in an age that is purposefully eroding masculinity, in a civilization that thinks being manly is a cartoonish idea at best, and a chauvinistic attack on femininity at worst.

We worried we were too late, that we had to know Wayne in the flesh to understand what he embodied. But then, late the following day, we heard something was taking place that might answer our questions about Wayne and what makes men.

We hurried from the newspaper office. Outside the wind had calmed as it sometimes does on summer evenings in the Rocky Mountain West. The evening light was being absorbed by dust hanging like fog over the sage as the sun sank into the Red Desert making the air glow Mars red.

We walked two blocks down hot sand-dusted streets to the Union Pacific’s railroad tracks. We’d been told three artists who had known Wayne in Chicago were there. When they’d heard Wayne had been killed they’d piled into a car and drove west for Wyoming. When they arrived they did the one thing they could. They found a canvas to express admiration for their fallen hero. They began painting an epitaph to their slain pal on the gray cement trusses of an overpass, a bridge that took cars over the railroad tracks.

Max and I stopped under the overpass in the soft, burgundy light. One artist was on a stepladder carefully painting. Another was on his knees in the dust painting the bottom of the mural. A third was mixing paints and checking a sketch.

“Hi, we’re journalists trying to understand who Wayne was,” Max said to all three.

They turned to us. After a long moment looking us over the man on the stepladder said softly, “If Wayne were here he’d ask about you. He’d want to know why you’re here. He’d patiently show you it’s not about him.”

“And he’d have you laughing as he did,” said the artist mixing paint.

“Remember the time he brought that homeless guy back to the apartment,” said the third. All three laughed about how Wayne asked this homeless man to pose for a painting about the Chicago streets and how he paid the man and talked him into getting help for his addiction by telling jokes about what drunk people say.

“He did that just to give the homeless dude some money,” said the man on the stepladder. “He thought if he just gave the guy money he’d hurt the man’s pride or something. He wanted the homeless guy to earn the money because he thought the dude would more likely do something good with it that way.”

They all sighed and shook their heads in wonder.

Soon the artist who was mixing paint said, “Wayne followed this code. He held himself and everyone else equal to it. He didn’t judge others by it but just tried to help them see the goodness in its timeless rules.”

“Takes guts to live that way,” said the artist who was working on the base of the mural.

They spoke a little more, putting flesh on the reputation of this fallen hero. But they were at a funeral and didn’t want to be disturbed, not now, not yet. We moved a respectable distance away and sat on a dirt embankment by the copper-colored train tracks and watched them paint.

This happened in the summer of 1997. I visited it again in 2017. I found that mural to Wayne still there under the overpass in Rawlins. It was just as bright and fresh as it was when I first saw it. Clearly, his friends had come back, many many times, to keep it so.