A former San Antonio police officer beat 39 child porn charges in court. The case had nothing to do with being innocent. It fell apart because his ex-fiance stole his phone.

All charges against Matthew D. Martin were dropped on June 22, 2026. A Bexar County court tossed the case after a judge threw out the only real proof. Without that proof, the DA had no case.

The phone was at the center of it all.

In January 2021, Martin's ex-fiance Ashley Pacheco found his old iPhone 6s in a safe the two shared. She moved out. She took the phone. She told Martin she had destroyed it. She had not. She kept it for six months.

In July 2021, Pacheco plugged the phone into the internet. She found a receipt for a GPS tracker. A cousin helped her find a real tracker hidden in the bumper of her truck. After that, she opened an app called Zip Extractor. She said she found hundreds of files of child porn.

She took the phone to a San Antonio police substation. Officers went through it without a warrant. The officer believed they had a common-law marriage, which he thought made the phone "community property." Courts later said that was wrong.

A judge ruled Pacheco had stolen the phone under Texas law. She had also broken a computer law by opening it without consent. That made all the phone proof useless in court. The legal term is "fruit of the poisonous tree." Proof from an illegal search gets thrown out. So does anything police found because of that search.

The Fourth Court of Appeals backed the judge in August 2025. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals then refused to hear the state's appeal.

Prosecutors had nothing left.

"We then filed a petition for discretionary review to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which was denied," the Bexar County DA's Office said. "Given the absence of this critical evidence, we were unable to proceed with prosecution, so we had to close the case."

Martin's defense lawyer, Ben Sifuentes Jr., said the charges should never have been filed. "This case should have never been filed," he told KSAT. He also raised questions about the phone. "I think since the phone was in her custody for six months, there's an issue as to how, whatever they did find, got on that phone," Sifuentes said.

This was not the first time Martin had trouble at SAPD.

In 2015, a body camera caught him telling a female passenger to lie about where drugs were found. He told her: "we're just going to say we found it all in the same spot."

SAPD fired him. He fought back. An arbitrator gave him his job back. He returned to work in August 2017.

About a year later, a new probe started. An anonymous letter reached reporters. It claimed Martin had lied about his military service during the arbitration. He had said he spent four years in the Marine Corps and worked guarding the U.S. President for the Secret Service. Records showed he likely never finished boot camp.

Martin resigned from SAPD on August 6, 2018, rather than face a perjury charge. Nothing ever came of the perjury case either.

The child porn case began with a grand jury charge in 2022. It ended four years later with every count dropped.

SAPD Chief William McManus was not available for comment, according to KSAT.

The stalking charge was also dropped along with the 39 porn counts.