Sarabia-Martinez

── Sarabia-Martinez ── Court: Colorado Court of Appeals Date: May 28, 2026 Category: General 23CA1611 Peo v Sarabia-Martinez 05-28-2026 COLORADO COURT OF APPEALS Court of Appeals No. 23CA1611 City and County of Denver District Court No. 14CR10280 Honorable Edward D. Bronfin, Judge Honorable Alex C. Myers, Judge The People of the State of Colorado, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Jose Ricardo Sarabia-Martinez, Defendant-Appellant. JUDGMENT AFFIRMED Division VI Opinion by JUDGE GOMEZ Moultrie and Berger*, JJ., concur NOT PUBLISHED PURSUANT TO C.A.R. 35(e) Announced May 28, 2026 Philip J. Weiser, Attorney General, Brittany Limes Zehner, Senior Assistant Attorney General and Assistant Solicitor General, Denver, Colorado, for Plaintiff-Appellee Tara Jorfald, Alternate Defense Counsel, Lakewood, Colorado; Jennifer Tuttle, Alternate Defense Counsel, Denver, Colorado, for Defendant-Appellant *Sitting by assignment of the Chief Justice under provisions of Colo. Const. art. VI, § 5(3), and § 24-51-1105, C.R.S. 2025. ¶1 Defendant, Jose Ricardo Sarabia-Martinez, appeals the judgment of conviction entered after a jury found him guilty of violations of the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act (COCCA) and other offenses stemming from a fraudulent mortgage scheme carried out by his family business. He contends that the trial court erred by (1) rejecting his statute of limitations challenges to three of the charges and declining to submit those issues to the jury; and (2) denying his request for substitution of his court-appointed counsel. We reject his contentions and affirm the judgment. I. Background ¶2 Starting in 2003, Sarabia-Martinez and several of his family members ran a fraudulent mortgage scheme through Worldwide Mortgage, Inc., and other family-owned businesses (collectively, Worldwide) operating in the real estate, mortgage, and property management industries. The scheme generally went like this: • Worldwide would find a straw buyer to purchase a residential property and would secure a mortgage by making false representations on the loan application. Worldwide would handle the down payment and closing 1  process on the property. The straw buyer would never take possession of the property or pay the mortgage. • Worldwide would then find a second straw buyer to purchase the property from the first straw buyer at a significantly higher price. Again, the straw buyer would secure a mortgage through false representations. And again, Worldwide would handle the down payment and closing process. • The proceeds from the second sale wouldn’t go to the first straw buyer. Instead, through a private payoff letter directing the title company to pay sale proceeds to someone else, the proceeds went into the bank account of one of Sarabia-Martinez’s family members before being rerouted to Worldwide’s bank account. • The second straw buyer also wouldn’t make the required mortgage payments, and the lender would eventually foreclose on the property. ¶3 The extent of this scheme was uncovered starting in October 2011, when Borrego Springs Bank (Borrego) submitted a hotline complaint followed by a suspicious activity report (SAR) with the 2  Small Business Administration (SBA). At that time, Worldwide had just defaulted on a $2.3 million loan taken out with Borrego and backed by the SBA to refinance Worldwide’s office space in Denver. ¶4 The following April, after Borrego had foreclosed on Worldwide’s loan, Borrego invited law enforcement agents to review the more than a hundred boxes of records left