Roman Maurice Martin, a 19-year-old male, was found shot to death in an Aurora, Colorado apartment on April 3, 2000. He was discovered alongside his 15-year-old girlfriend, Krisunda Jeanne Temple, inside a residence on Lansing Street in east Aurora, a place the teens had been staying together. Both victims had been struck by multiple rounds; contemporaneous accounts note each suffered eight gunshot wounds, with Temple shot twice in the face.
The brutality inside the small apartment contrasted with the quiet residential block outside, where the double homicide jolted neighbors and drew an intense response from Aurora detectives.
Investigators quickly focused on a familial lead: Roman’s younger brother, 18-year-old Joshua Wayne Andrews. Prosecutors alleged the brothers had been embroiled in escalating disputes in the weeks leading up to the killings, a volatile dynamic that boiled over after an argument, culminating in the gunfire that left the couple dead. Andrews was arrested that summer and brought into Arapahoe County District Court, where he faced two counts of first-degree murder and was ordered held without bond while the case moved forward.
The case against Andrews went to trial the following year. Despite the state’s narrative that anger and sibling conflict provided the spark for the shooting, jurors ultimately acquitted him of the murders, leaving Roman Martin’s case without a convicted perpetrator. Accounts of the trial describe a defense that emphasized reasonable doubt about who fired the shots inside the apartment and cast alternative possibilities on the violence that unfolded there. In the wake of the verdict, the formal resolution of Roman’s homicide remained elusive, even as Andrews later surfaced in unrelated investigations and prosecutions in other jurisdictions.
Roman Martin’s name endures in public databases of victims lost to gun violence on that date and in that city, a stark line in a ledger that offers few details beyond the essentials: his age, the date, the place, and the fact of the shooting. Those spare entries sit alongside the early reports identifying him and Temple as the young couple found inside the Lansing Street apartment, reminders that a definitive legal closure to what happened there was never secured.
