Ralph Jaojoco hadn’t seen his old Marine Corps platoonmate, Ethan Martinez, in twenty years when he decided to look him up on a whim. What he found made his heart sink.
Martinez was dead. The 42-year-old had been stabbed in the neck and chest in Denver. His body was pulled from the Platte River along the Cherry Creek Trail on July 16, 2024, launching a murder investigation that has yielded no arrests to this day, according to the Denver Police Department.
“I’m still in shock,” says Jaojoco, a 49-year-old veteran now living in Hawaii. “I remember him being a strong, kind and joyful person. There was a time in his life when he was on top of the world, not under a bridge, murdered.”…