A Colorado city council member asked a simple question at a July 2023 public meeting, not knowing it would take more than two years to find out the answer.
Lakewood City Councilor Anita Springsteen called on the city’s police to release body camera footage showing why officers shot and killed a teenage girl months earlier.
“It may very well be that there is absolutely no question about what had to happen there, but I think the city should be forthcoming, in that case, about what occurred,” she said to the council. “I mean, what’s going on?”
She was skeptical because police in the Denver suburb had initially provided differing narratives of the March incident, which began after a resident reported a mail carrier had been robbed at gunpoint in front of her home by two teenage girls.
A police department spokesperson initially told reporters that the teen suspect had shot and wounded an officer before police shot and killed her in front of an auto repair business. Later that day, the department released a slightly different statement, indicating the suspect had only pointed a gun at police, leading officers to open fire. The wounded officer recovered.
Springsteen, who is also a civil rights attorney, said her concern grew in August when the city received a notice from an attorney representing the 17-year-old’s estate claiming officers fired close to 30 shots at the girl.
“That sounds like a scene out of 'Scarface,'” Springsteen told Scripps News.
“It was a concern to me that they were in front of a business where people were working right behind them, and there [were] bullets flying all over the place,” she added.
In September 2023, a Critical Incident Response Team working under the authority of the district attorney found the officers’ actions that day to be justified, finding a reasonable person would believe it was necessary for the officers to use deadly physical force to defend themselves.
The following month, a letter from the police chief said his review of an internal affairs investigation also found the officers’ use of force to be “objectively reasonable” and “in compliance” with department policies and the law.
But the video of the police encounter would not become public until more than two years after it happened, only after a court battle waged by Scripps News.
Lakewood initially denied public records requests for the video from Scripps News and other media. In a denial sent to Scripps News, an attorney for the city cited statutes referring to juvenile privacy rights as their reason for withholding the records.
The city released the video only after Scripps News sent a legal demand letter, filed a lawsuit, prevailed, won again on appeal and paid the city for its time spent blurring the footage.
Note: the first 30 seconds of this police body camera footage is silent, as is typical for these recordings. Scripps News edited this video to pause it before the teen is shot, added captions, and highlighted the weapon she held.
The video reviewed by Scripps News showed Lakewood officers chasing 17-year-old robbery suspect Mariana Martinez and surrounding her in front of the auto shop.
One officer pulled out a taser, and another shouted at him to use it. But after the teen pulled out a gun and pointed it in the direction of police, three officers each fired multiple shots, hitting her ten times. She died later that day at a nearby hospital.
No charges were filed against the officers involved, and all three officers received public commendations for their actions that day.
While the video affirmed the police department’s account of what happened that day, the city’s efforts to withhold it represented one of the first tests of the reforms passed by the Colorado legislature after the murder of George Floyd.
“Because of the law, we are receiving the truth”
During the heat of the 2020 summer of protests following Floyd’s death, Colorado lawmakers spent weeks hammering out a slate of policy reforms to “enhance law enforcement integrity” in the state.
“It took about 16 days of hard, all-day negotiations, with law enforcement, with community, with activists, and with other folks that were involved … to come together to come up with the bill that we have today,” former state Rep. Leslie Herod, a Democrat, told Scripps News about the law she co-sponsored. “One of the critical points was body camera.”
Signed into law in June 2020, the Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act required all law enforcement agencies to issue body-worn cameras to their officers and required agencies to release footage from cases where there were complaints of misconduct lodged against police within 21 days of the receipt of the complaint.
“The key was we wanted unedited body cam footage released in a decent amount of time so that there couldn’t be a narrative that was put in place … as opposed to reality and the truth,” said Herod.
“Because of the law, we are receiving the truth. We’re seeing it quicker, and we’re seeing it unedited,” she said. “And I’m proud of that.”
“When do we see them as a child and when do we see them as an adult?”
Scripps News referenced that law in its requests to Lakewood police for video from the March 2023 shooting, but the city attorney’s office said police would not release the video because the juvenile suspect who was killed had privacy rights that could only be waived by her family.
In August 2023, after the attorney representing Martinez’s estate sent the city of Lakewood a notice of a potential lawsuit over the shooting, records indicate the city allowed the teen’s family to view the body camera footage.
After a city attorney told a family representative they believed the family could decide whether or not the footage would be released to the media, the relative sent an email to Lakewood saying they did not want the footage released. (Scripps News attempted to reach out to family members months after the shooting, but the people who answered the door said they did not want to speak with us. The attorney who sent the letter on behalf of the teen’s estate did not file a lawsuit and no longer represents the estate.)
Colorado’s law says “any video that raises substantial privacy concerns” including those depicting “a minor” shall be blurred or redacted before its release to the public, and “if redaction or blurring is insufficient to protect the substantial privacy interest” the video should be released to the “victim” or the victim’s legal representative who could “waive the privacy interest.”
In the Lakewood case, the city argued blurring the teen suspect’s face would not sufficiently protect her privacy, but the courts disagreed, ordering the city to release the blurred video.
Denver First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg, along with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, represented Scripps News in court.
“I believed strongly and believe strongly today that… Scripps was entitled to receive this footage within 21 days of requesting it, and that the City of Lakewood's refusal to provide it to you was unlawful, and that's ultimately what both the trial court and the court of appeals held,” Zansberg told Scripps News.
Herod said lawmakers did not intend for body-worn camera videos depicting police incidents involving juvenile suspects to be withheld when they wrote the law, noting that the legislation allowed for such videos to be blurred.
“Frankly, I’d ask the question — if that child were to make it out of that interaction alive, would they be tried as an adult? When do we see them as a child and when do we see them as an adult?” Herod said.
“I believe that should be across the board, if a life was taken at the hands of law enforcement … we should be able to see what really happened,” she said.
“They’re little kids”
While Lakewood police fought against releasing their video of the shooting, the department and the court did provide records to Scripps News that painted a picture of how the teen girl ended up surrounded by police officers that day.
A postal carrier told police it began when a young girl in a black hoodie walked up and asked him if she could borrow his phone to make a call.
He agreed, and she tried several times to call someone who she said wasn’t answering. Soon, a younger girl approached the truck, and the older girl, later identified as Mariana Martinez, pulled out a gun, the mail carrier said. She demanded his keys.
The postal worker escaped, hiding in a backyard nearby. The woman who lived there called 911.
Police chased down Martinez a few blocks away, surrounded her in front of the auto shop, and shot her after she pointed a gun at them. Police video obtained by Scripps News showed the mailman, hiding in the yard, speaking to an officer after a flurry of gunshots was heard in the distance.
“I hope they’re OK. I mean, Jesus Christ. They’re little kids,” he said.
“Life will never be the same”
Hours after the shooting, police tracked down the other teen, Martinez’s 13-year-old sister, in a car with an adult named Ashley Cortez. The sister was not criminally charged, according to the district attorney.
Prosecutors charged Cortez in connection with the aggravated robbery of the mail carrier, and she reached a plea deal earlier this year.
Police said Cortez had a history of mail theft, and they came to believe she recruited the girls to commit a similar crime. A neighbor’s Ring camera captured footage of Cortez in the neighborhood with the girls before the robbery, handing Martinez a black object police believed was possibly the gun, according to court documents.
At her sentencing, Cortez’s defense attorney argued she did not plan the robbery or provide the gun, and only dropped the teens off in the neighborhood so one of them could visit a boyfriend. But her attorney said she admitted guilt in court because she “could have done more to stop it.”
Though Cortez was not convicted of causing Martinez’s death directly, prosecutors argued that she deserved a harsher sentence because the girl died.
“We can’t ignore that she coerced a 17-year-old and 13-year-old to go and commit this crime for her. That she put a gun in the 17-year-old’s hand, and it is because of that action alone that a child is dead,” prosecutor Lenae Davis said in court, according to a transcript of the proceeding.
In court, the prosecutor read a statement from Martinez’s mother, who described the girl as a hard worker who was saving up to buy a car. She got her first fast food job at 15, but it was her job at a Subway sandwich shop managed by Cortez, her mother said, that started the series of events that ended her life.
“Life will never be the same,” her mother said in the statement read in court.
The judge sentenced Cortez to serve 28 years in prison.
“They are putting the blame on me, which is not right,” Cortez told Scripps News from prison. “I wasn’t even there when the robbery happened or when they killed her.”
“Why were we not permitted to see it?”
By the time Anita Springsteen watched the video she publicly called on the city to release two years prior, her city council term had already ended.
Watching the video of the police shooting obtained by Scripps News in 2025, she wondered aloud why the city fought for years to keep the footage secret.
“It looks to me like she pointed her gun at them and they shot her,” Springsteen said. “Part of my question, again, is why were not permitted to see it?”
Lakewood police declined a request for an interview for this story. In a written statement, police spokesperson John Romero said the department was “not attempting to obscure an incident that would have painted our agents or agency in a bad light.”
“LPD has always maintained that just because the video in question depicts LPD agents acting in a justified manner, that didn’t supersede a family’s interest in not having their juvenile loved one’s tragic final moments broadcast to the world,” Romero wrote.
“While we respect the decision of the Court of Appeals and released the video at their order, LPD still believes that an individual, or their next of kin, should decide whether video which captures them in a private moment should be released to the public,” he continued.
When asked if that statement meant LPD would withhold similar future videos involving juvenile suspects, Romero responded, “We will continue to follow the law as it is written as it pertains to the release of body worn cameras to the public and media.”
“People have already decided ... just based on the lack of information”
A policing expert told Scripps News that agencies are frequently grappling with these dilemmas as the usage of body-worn cameras becomes more widespread.
“We have to recognize that we live in an environment now where access to information instantaneously is kind of expected,” said Humberto Cardounel, a senior director at the National Policing Institute. “Now with body-worn camera, [police] have another resource to actually help visualize, help understand what actually occurred.”
Cardounel, a former police chief who now focuses on training law enforcement across the country, advises law enforcement agencies to have clear policies in place about when body-worn camera video will be released. He said police, at times, are not allowed to release video relating to ongoing prosecutions and have to balance other considerations like a family’s opposition to the release of footage.
When police delay releasing video, Cardounel said, they are “working against an insurmountable challenge, which is people have already decided or made up their mind or developed an idea just based on the lack of information.”
“Even though in this case the body-worn camera footage may have validated what was being presented, it was the delay in complying with the release that caused or generated or added to some of that consternation and some of that distrust,” he said.
In Colorado, law enforcement agencies often release videos from officer-involved shootings with detailed explanations of what occurred within days or weeks of the gunfire.
That has included incidents where juveniles were hurt or killed. In September, Aurora police shot a 17-year-old after he called 911 from a gas station saying he planned to “shoot the place up.” By the end of the month, police had released a “critical incident briefing” video, which includes portions of the 911 call and the crucial moments leading up to the gunfire, narrated by a department spokesperson.
The appellate decision in the Lakewood case set a precedent, meaning the decision will be binding for all trial courts should the body camera sections of Colorado’s police reform law end up in court in the future.
“I think ultimately we obtained a good published precedent that will guide hopefully not only future trial court judges, but police departments throughout the state,” Zansberg said.
