"He knew he was going to die": Mother of South Austin homicide victim asking for help to solve his case

The mother of South Austin homicide victim Cory Arizmendez says her son had warned her that he would be killed more than a month before his death. Now she is asking for the public's help in solving his case.

"It scared me to death because he felt he was going to be killed," said Anne Martinez. "He, in his heart…he knew he was going to die. And he just wanted me to know." 

Around 4 a.m. Easter Sunday, Arizmendez's prediction came true. Someone called Austin 911 about finding a possibly deceased person in a neighborhood off South Congress Avenue. The 35-year-old ironworker's body was found on E. Milton Street, just two blocks over from South Congress, with obvious trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police initially called this as a suspicious death, but now are investigating his death as a homicide.

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"He had been talking to me for about five weeks that he was in danger. He couldn't tell me very much," Martinez said. "Just saying, I love you. You know, I'm going to go over here if you don't hear from me, mom, you know, at least you know."

Martinez says that the situation was "very frightening" and that she had talked with her husband and Arizmendez's siblings about it.

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"You know, we're all like, is he going crazy? You know, and I and I let them know, like, he's stone-cold sober," Martinez said. "The details that he did give me, which is not very much when he repeated it, it was verbatim the exact same thing over a five-week span."

Martinez says her son considered going home to Fort Bend, but that wasn't his nature. "He wanted to face whatever it was. And that's not who Cory was, you know, he just wasn't going to back down and, you know, be made to cower," she said.

Arizmendez came to Austin two years ago for a higher paying union job and a clean slate for him and his 13-year-old and four-year-old daughters. "[He will] never walk them down an aisle at graduation, and he'll never see his own grandkids. And you know, Emory is so small I don't even know she'll remember him, like his voice. So we'll have to carry on his memory by talking about him," Martinez said.

Martinez is asking anybody with cameras in the area to share their Easter morning footage, even if it seems insignificant, with Austin Police. 

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"My son is not number 20. Death number 20 in Austin. My son is a thirty five-year-old father, son, brother, friend to many," Martinez said. "We just…we just want answers, you know, and I have to bury my son without knowing why. And that's too painful, and I shouldn't be doing that."

Martinez says her son had been living in an apartment with a friend about three miles from where his body was found.