Noelani Martinez plays Paramore and early Panic! at the Disco songs before going on a 20-minute run to mentally separate school from home.
After homework, she’ll jam out on the drums to ’80s rock music.
It’s an outlet, and a way to feel emotions, inspired by her mother, Gail Martinez, whom she lost in a 2016 terror attack at Brussels Airport. The Martinez family was traveling to Florida when their lives changed forever.
Martinez, who was only 9 at the time of the attack, had never spoken about her story — until April, when she was named a 2024 Military Child of the Year, representing the Air Force, by Operation Homefront. She used the opportunity to talk about her side of the story for the first time, teenage mental health and how she’s marching to the beat of her own drum, motivated by her mom’s legacy.
Martinez and her three siblings were primarily raised by their mom, while their dad, Retired Air Force Col. and Purple Heart recipient Melchizedek “Kato” Martinez, served on deployment on several missions in different countries.
Her mom was lively, always listening to the radio. Martinez and her three siblings would sing along with her and dance in the living room to music games, like Just Dance.
After the attack, “for the longest time, I didn’t know how to cope,” Martinez said.
All those emotions came back in quarantine, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to feel it all over again. But music, grounded her.
Martinez is 17 now. She’s short in stature and has red streaks in her hair. Before her hair was red, it was purple, and before that, it was silver.
She’s positive and animated, and she speaks with excitement. Wearing a dinosaur T-shirt from the National Museum of Natural History, she proudly showed her collection of K-pop band posters, numerous certificates and art projects on her bedroom walls.
It’s exam season before entering senior year, and she’s preparing to apply to college. She hopes to find enough scholarships and grants to cover tuition to study music production at the private Berklee College of Music in Boston or to study abroad in South Korea. Her dream is to play a role in making listeners feel a connection through music in video games and films, like she felt in those happy moments with her mom.
She found solace in music during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she discovered one of her dad’s childhood possessions stored away in the garage: A drum set which happened to be her mother’s favorite color, red.
Martinez started to play and dove into music more deeply. She felt that same joy she felt as a child with her mom and realized that the feeling of music was universal.
A family shattered, then rebuilt
Now, Martinez is using the tragedy in her family’s story to help others.
“Because of Military Child of the Year, I’m thankful I’m getting more opportunities to share my side of my story. People assumed I didn’t remember what was going on, but even though I was young, I actually comprehended,” she said.
Martinez, her three siblings, Kianni, Kimo and Kailani and Kato Martinez sustained major injuries in the attack: Third-degree burns, shrapnel and bullet wounds, ruptured ear drums, shattered bones, punctured lungs and head trauma.
Two of the children— now young adults — and Martinez’s father are still seeing specialists to recover from injuries. Kato Martinez will need surgery to remove shrapnel in his right foot and left elbow soon, as the pain has been increasing.
Martinez’s family was in medically induced comas for months due to their injuries. Martinez was the only one not as sedated as her siblings, Kato Martinez said, and was the only one able to walk around.
She slid into a caretaker role; Hospital staff and visitors saw a 9-year-old girl holding onto her siblings’ hands and whispering that she was there. As they woke up one by one, she saw the need to reassure them everything would be OK.
“Her mom worked through her. Her mom chose her because she was the strongest one out of all of us to make sure her siblings and I were going to be OK,” her father said in an interview.
Then he turned to his daughter.
“As a 9-year-old, you can’t understand that. … You were the strongest one out of all of us,” he told Martinez.
“It didn’t hit hard until later on,” she said. Eight years later, there are moments when she realizes, “This is something I never resolved.”
“You do get better, but you don’t forget. You cope, but it doesn’t disappear,” she said.
Now, her musical pursuits inspire her to share “such deep emotions, like sadness or pure joy and pure excitement … through music,” she said. “I wanted to recreate that … I would love to do that as a job. That would make me so happy because I love music.”
When she plays the drums, she’s almost not thinking about anything. It’s simply “a feeling,” she said. She recently performed at a School of Rock concert at Fiesta De Los Reyes at Historic Market Square.
“Those negative feelings, negative emotions, get battled with my music and I can just log out and jam,” she said.
Moving forward together
Gail Martinez’s memory also lives on at the family’s home. Curtains hang in her favorite color across the living and dining rooms; yellow and red roses honor her on the entry table with a red mantle, and the walls are filled with photos of family vacations to Disney, communion celebrations and selfies, with many posthumous awards in her honor.
Martinez, who lives with depression and anxiety, said she’s struggled with suicidal ideation in the wake of her mom’s death. Kato Martinez said he, like his daughter, “struggles with darkness” and survived a suicide attempt — now, they both fight back against high veteran suicide rates by sharing their stories.
Kato Martinez shares with veterans how to cope in the face of adversity at public speaking engagements with the Air Force. Martinez wants to do the same and focus on teenage mental health and share with adults how she processed the trauma she endured, “especially with [increasing] suicide rates,” she said.
After an uptick in suicide rates in the Air Force “and across the board in the military” in 2019, Kato Martinez spoke at Fort Sam Houston. That day, three people said that if they had not attended the talk, they were going to commit suicide.
“That’s when I knew, OK, maybe there is some reason why I’m still here,” Kato Martinez said. “If I can just save one person, I just keep telling myself that. … There’s got to be a reason for me.”
Though he lives in a busy home filled with family and friends who stop by to visit, he still feels alone.
“My partner isn’t here anymore. My soulmate, my other half,” he said. Sometimes it feels like being in darkness, he said, “but you’re not alone.”
The five cameras on the front door and more security measures around the home show he employs layers of security to protect his family, assuaging a sense of guilt he still feels from the March 22, 2016 attack.
“That day that I lost my wife, I feel responsible for that, even though years of therapy, doctors and everyone has told me, ‘There’s no way you could have known.’ But it was my job,” Kato Martinez said.
Since the attack, the family’s lives are all about pain management; But the motivation to honor Gail Martinez gives Martinez and her siblings the strength to shine bright in everything they do.
“That’s a reflection of her, and I will never take credit for that,” Kato Martinez said.
A red cardinal flew by and landed on the tree in front of their home Wednesday afternoon.
“That’s Gail’s angel, my loved one. She’s always here,” Kato Martinez said. “She’s in every one of [my children]. She raised them with good manners, with good values. That’s what I want to keep going. The strength, love and resiliency, that’s all her.”
