NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By Mark Mueller and Brian Donohue
Additional reporting by Enrique Lavin and Vinessa Erminio
Estelí, Nicaragua — More than 200 guests sang “Feliz Cumpleaños” — Happy Birthday — to the man they’d come to celebrate in this city’s most elegant banquet hall in November. Mariachis strolled the room, serenading the Dominican-born preacher and his friends.
Gregorio Martinez, a self-proclaimed prophet and missionary with ties to the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination, had but one request of those gathered for his 48th birthday, according to three people who attended.
No pictures.
None.
Martinez had reason for caution. He needed to remain a ghost.
For more than a year now, Martinez has been a fugitive from New Jersey, where a jury took just 30 minutes to convict him of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy he knew from his Hudson County church.
Permitted to remain free on $250,000 bail despite additional sexual assault counts pending against him, Martinez disappeared within weeks of the verdict.
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