When a deputy of the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department pulled over 60-year-old Bill Martin on the Interstate 70 Business Loop early Thursday morning, Martin assumed it merely was a routine traffic stop.
It was only when the deputy asked the Vietnam War veteran and owner of A-1 Repossessions to return to his home and business, at 518 Road 30, that Martin suspected something was amiss.
Rolling up to his home, just north of the highway, Martin spotted nearly a dozen marked and unmarked Sheriff’s Department cars and more than 30 officers, some dressed in full body armor.
“Oh man,” Martin said, “they had the SWAT team and guys in full masks and automatic weapons.”
He said the deputies told him they had executed a search warrant on his home and were there to seize more than 150 of his family’s guns, ranging from antique muskets to his hunting rifles.
“I told them not all of those guns are mine, a lot of them are family (guns),” Martin said.
Nonetheless, he said, the SWAT team emptied his hidden, walk-in gun vault and shorted out the door mechanism that opens his basement’s secret room.
“It’s a family gun collection — multiple, family gun collection, really,” he said.
According to the affidavit Sheriff’s Department investigators used to obtain a no-knock search warrant for Martin’s home and business, authorities began investigating Martin’s collection in mid-May after one of his guns, a .44-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, was seized during a 2006 domestic violence incident.
During a May 15 interview, Martin told investigators he loaned the gun to Jody Haskell, the boyfriend of one of his employees, before it was seized.
During Martin’s conversation with investigators about how he originally bought the revolver and how he could get it back, he invited them to his house to show them his gun collection.
“Bill took us down a flight of stairs where the hallway turned left,” the search warrant affidavit said. “Bill activated a hidden device of some type located near the top of the wall, which caused a panel on the wall to move, exposing a room.”
Behind the false wall, investigators found “gun racks filled with what appeared to be in excess of one hundred firearms,” according to the affidavit.
When investigators learned earlier this week of Martin’s 1991 guilty plea to vehicular assault, they began drawing up the search warrant affidavit.
Under Colorado law, convicted felons are barred from owning or possessing firearms.
“I was told in ’91 and ’92 that I could have guns, I could go hunting,” Martin said. “No one has ever told me otherwise, and if I had known that, I would not have taken them downstairs.”
Martin said his probation officer told him he could own guns for hunting and home protection.
As the Sheriff’s Department hauled off his family’s gun collection and all of his ammunition, investigators told him they would let him know whether he would be arrested, he said.
In the meantime, Martin said he still is trying to understand why the Sheriff’s Department would use a no-knock warrant to search his home and business.
“I’m here, and I’ve got two dachshunds and a wife, you know? And then they have 30 SWAT guys descend on this house,” Martin said. “That’s overkill.”
