Jose Flores, a 25-year-old Hispanic man, was killed on October 23, 2016, after a night at CC Nightclub on Bessemer Road in Birmingham turned deadly. Police said officers were called shortly after 9 p.m. and found Flores on the floor inside the club with multiple gunshot wounds. He was taken to Princeton Hospital, but he did not survive. Early witness accounts described a sudden, violent encounter inside the nightclub, saying an unknown man approached Flores and opened fire several times before
fleeing with a woman in an unknown vehicle, leaving investigators to piece together what had happened in the chaotic moments after the shooting.
As the investigation moved quickly, authorities said the shooting grew out of an argument involving a woman. Within days, Birmingham police announced the arrest of Walter Martinez, 26, charging him with murder in Flores’s death. Police also said Martinez was charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance and was being held in the Jefferson County Jail on a $120,000 bond. Later public reporting identified him more fully as Walter Alonso Martinez-Chandias. The City of Birmingham’s homicide data indicates the case was cleared by arrest, reflecting that police considered the homicide solved from an investigative standpoint.
Online records also show the case did not end with the initial arrest. In August 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Martinez-Chandias, described there as a Honduran national, was sentenced in federal court to six years and nine months in prison for being in the United States illegally and possessing firearms. Federal authorities said one of those guns was used in the 2016 nightclub homicide, and according to his guilty plea, he admitted to detectives that he possessed the Taurus pistol in connection with the shooting. That federal announcement also stated that he still faced state charges tied to the homicide. In the public sources located, the arrest and the later federal gun case are clearly documented, but an accessible online report confirming a final state murder trial result or conviction in Flores’s killing was not readily available.
