Dan Corsentino, CEO of DC Security in Pueblo County, Colorado, tells Inside Edition Digital that Martinez went through rigorous background checks before being hired.
The CEO of the Colorado security company that 26-year-old Solomon Martinez was working for when he was arrested allegedly with a severed hand in his pocket tells Inside Edition Digital that though it appeared there were no red flags ahead of his hiring, it appears he may have lied on his job application.
Dan Corsentino, CEO of DC Security in Pueblo County, tells Inside Edition Digital that Martinez went through rigorous background checks before being hired for the job. “The supervisors are trained to look for red flags. We look for comments that are made. We look for reckless, careless behavior when they're on the firing line. Anything that would be abnormal,” Corsentino says.
Martinez appeared to be a nonproblematic employee, Corsentino says, noting there was “absolutely not” any issue with him and “there was nothing that he did” in the time he worked for DC Security that would have raised concerns. But the CEO did say his time with the company before his arrest was brief.
“Solomon Martinez worked for us for 52 hours and 57 minutes, which when you put it in total time, comes out to approximately five days. So he wasn't here for a week, total seven days. He wasn't here for a month, 30. He was here for five days,” Corsentino says. “We tried to do the best we could on the front end, but even if he had been here 30 days, we would've had a better snapshot of this individual."
Corsentino said that in the five days that Martinez worked for him, he was late by over an hour once. "We have a geofencing tracking system where we can tell where every security operator is while they're on duty," he says. "And so the sophistication level of my operation is such where we turned all that over to the local Pueblo police department and they could track where he was on duty at any given time during the five days, 52 hours, that he worked.”
Martinez was arrested after police discovered the decapitated and dismembered body of a woman. Someone connected to Martinez’s roommate reportedly called police to say a body had been dumped in Fountain Creek on Jan. 10, according to reports. Martinez’s roommate, identified by police as Joshua Mazzurco, was questioned by police and said he refused to help Martinez, but police records obtained by Pueblo Chieftain say he watched Martinez allegedly dump the body.
Martinez was living with Mazzurco and his wife in their home, cops said according to Pueblo Chieftain. Mazzurco did not respond to Inside Edition Digital's request for comment. Mazzurco and his wife have not been charged and they are not suspects in the woman’s death.
In addition to someone connected to Mazzurco initially calling authorities, police also said it was Mazzurco’s wife that led them to Martinez’s place of work when he was arrested, according to KRDO.
The deceased has not been publicly identified.
When Martinez was arrested, a police officer found a human hand inside a plastic bag inside the left chest pocket of the suspect’s jacket, according to the arrest warrant obtained by the Pueblo Chieftain.
“I had a hand in my jacket for two days,” Martinez reportedly told police, according to KRDO.
Police believe the hand belongs to the woman who was found dead in the creek. Martinez allegedly told detectives that he hired the woman as a sex worker the night before she was found but said that he did not kill her nor dismember anyone, according to court records obtained by the Pueblo Chieftain.
Corsentino says he had one brief interaction with Martinez.
“I'd never seen him before. I said hello to him and asked how his day was, and his response was, ‘I'm good, boss.’ And he said, ‘I've really never had a chance to sit down and talk to an owner of a business.’ I said, ‘OK, well maybe you'll get that opportunity at some point.’ And then I went about my business," he says. "That was the only time that I had any contact with him.”
Corsentino says there was one item on Martinez's previous employment that stuck out. “He had said he was a Russian mercenary. And we thought 'That's peculiar.' So we pursued that and we attempted to go and reach out, but we didn't have the tools to go through Interpol or ICE, if you will, and there was no information available to get a passport from him. There was no communication which would've validated that statement or not,” Corsentino says. “We can only act upon the information that's given to us from a candidate. And I think the police department is, I can't speak for them, I haven't talked to them about it, but the information I'm receiving is they're still verifying [that] he's who he says he is.”
A Facebook profile for Martinez said he was from California and had recently moved to Colorado. A recent post on his Facebook page was a meme that read, “Romantic Date Idea: We Headbutt Each Other Until One of Us Dies."
Inside Edition Digital's attempt to reach Martinez have been unsuccessful.
The Pueblo Police Department declined to comment on the case. The Pueblo District Attorney's office has not responded to Inside Edition Digital's request for comment.
Cortensino, who served as the Pueblo County Chief of Police for 27 years, says he was woken up by one of his supervisors when they got the news that Martinez was arrested on the job. He called the news "jaw-dropping."
"I was like, ‘You have got to be s****ing me. This is a tragic situation,” he says.
But he also came to realize that Martinez allegedly was not accurate on his job application.
"He had said, for an example that he listed an emergency contact that was his sister, and that didn't match up. And so I sent my investigators to contact this person, and it was actually the person he was living with and her husband and children, but he listed that as his sister," he says.
“Solomon Martinez a very disturbed individual. I don't know what his mindset could have possibly been at that point in time. But the gravity of that act, to carry around a severed hand, perhaps as a trophy so he could keep it, or perhaps he was going to dispose of it later. I cannot even put my mind close [to], or wrap it around what his thought process would've been,” Corsentino says. “The dismemberment of this individual is a very profound act that, from my perspective, comes from a completely irrational, frickin' crazy human being. Why would you do that?
“It is a human tragedy. We know that she was a mother, we know she had family, and we know that that family is grieving," he says. "I understand that side of it. I was in the situation years ago, where my brother-in-law was murdered and so I get it. And I understand what it's like to be on the other side of it. But in the same breath, I would like the family to know that we extend our deepest sympathy to them, and we also wish there was something we could have done that would've prevented this, but there was nothing that gave us an indication that this person was a violent person.”
Moving forward, Corsentino's company will utilize a third party to vet candidates even more thoroughly than they previously did. He is also conducting additional background checks on current employees.
Martinez is due in court on Jan. 23. He has not yet entered a plea nor does he have any legal representation listed. He is being held at the Pueblo County jail on a $1 million cash-only bond.
