Gunshot victim sets anger aside to help at-risk kids

As Ruben Martinez lay in his hospital bed with a gunshot wound that had penetrated his stomach, damaged his bladder and large intestine and exited out his back, his first thought was getting even. "My first reaction was, I wanted revenge. I was angry. I had got shot for no reason. The first thing on my mind was I wanted to get these people back," he said. But as the weeks passed, Martinez, who thought he had "a thousand friends," started to wonder why only four people, all of them family members, were the only ones who visited him at the hospital. It was at that point, that Martinez took a close look at where his life was, where it was going and why he needed to change. "What kept going through my head was, if I keep doing everything I was doing, and living in the streets most of the time, kickin' it with my friends, I might end up either in jail because of the revenge, dead, or someone else in my family would end up getting hurt," he said. "I figured I didn't want to do that. I wanted to improve my life. I wanted to do something with my life. Once I knew where my life could have been, I wanted to do something else about it." That was in 2007 when Martinez was 16. Rather than revenge and anger, Martinez focused his energy on helping at-risk youth just like himself, stay out of trouble. Today, Martinez, now 18, is about to become the first person in his family to graduate from high school and go to college. He is being honored by the American Red Cross Greater Salt Lake Area Chapter as part of their 2010 Hero Awards, which will be presented March 3. He will receive the Youth Good Samaritan Award. After Martinez got out of the hospital, he joined the local group YouthWorks, aimed at keeping at-risk youth, particularly in the Glendale, Poplar Grove and Rose Park areas of Salt Lake City stay out of trouble through community service. In just the three to four months Martinez was there, he became a team leader and helped build fences, frame homes and host a community BBQ in which he grilled more than 500 hot dogs and hamburgers. "It was a good feeling. After building fences and doing some framework, it got me proud of myself. It made me realize, 'Hey I did this, I did that.' We could do whatever we want," he said. "It made me realize, you know what? I did that. Me and my friends built that fence and it's still standing today. Every time we drive by, I say to my friends, 'You see that fence? We did that man. What's up, you like it?'" Martinez said his life today is mostly studying and school. It's a far cry from two years ago when he said he was known as mostly a party guy. On the day he was shot, Martinez was walking home from a convenience store. "A car pulled up out of nowhere. They jumped me, shot me, and after that they just left. I got up and started walking. I didn't realize I was shot. I just kept walking," he said. It wasn't until a friend pulled up and told Martinez that he was bleeding that he realized what had happened. The alleged shooter claimed Martinez had been in a verbal confrontation with them a few hours earlier. Martinez, however, who was never in a gang, was actually with his family. "They confused me with somebody else," he said. Martinez had at least five surgeries and his medical bills soared to near $200,000. His family is still struggling to pay the bills. When Martinez got out of the hospital, his old friends eventually came back around. But he said he didn't fall back into old habits. "They'd be like, 'Hey, let's go party.' I'd be like, 'Dude, where were you the last six months?'" "'Where else? Partying, getting drunk, this and that. You know what we do,'" Martinez said was their reply. "I said, 'Yeah, and you couldn't take one day to come visit me?' I couldn't consider them friends anymore. They were just acquaintances, people I knew," he said.