It's been 13 1/2 years since Efren "Nerf" Martinez left the job he loved, not because he wanted to, but because a tragic electrical accident at Los Alamos National Laboratory inured his brain and left him in a permanent vegetative state.

Martinez, a 49-year-old father of two, died Tuesday of kidney failure and complications from his injuries, his brother-in-law, Richard Pacheco, said.

He never regained consciousness after the January 1996 incident, in which a jackhammer he was operating hit a 13-kilovolt electrical cable buried in a concrete floor. Martinez was also severely burned in the accident.

"It was horrific," said Pacheco, who's sister Gloria is Martinez's wife. "The lab made a lot of mistakes."

Martinez spent the past 13 1/2 years at a nursing home in Los Alamos.

The family settled a lawsuit with the lab and the University of California, which operated LANL at the time, for more than $13 million back in 1998, Pacheco said.

A Department of Energy accident report at the time found several safety errors were made that led to Martinez's injuries.

A week before the accident, the lab approved a request by Johnson Controls World Services Inc., which employed Martinez, to put a draining pit in the basement of the building in the lab's TA 21 complex. The problem, the report said, was that the lab didn't tell the company that the pit site was directly over an electrical cable.

The report also said no attempt was made to resuscitate Martinez until six minutes after the shock, which sent him into cardiac arrest. And it found that medical personnel didn't succeed in restarting Martinez's heart until 32 minutes after the accident.

Perhaps the saddest thing, though, is that Martinez's two sons, Marcos, 21, and Antonio, 17, never really got to spend much time with their father, Pacheco said.

"It was tough for them to see him like that," Pacheco said. "It was hard for the boys because they never really got to know their dad."

What Pacheco remembers most about his brother-in-law is that he was a hard worker and avid outdoorsman, he said.

"He'd always volunteer to work overtime," Pacheco said. "He just loved to work. He would volunteer for snow-clearing shifts, middle-of-the-night shifts, he just loved his job."

When he wasn't working, Martinez used to raise horses, cows, chickens, pigs and other animals at his home in Cordova. And he loved hunting in the New Mexico wilderness, Pacheco said.

"He loved being in the woods," Pacheco said. "He didn't like going to stores or shopping. He was just an outdoorsman."

Martinez will be cremated at the De Vargas Funeral Home in Española in the near future. Arrangements for a memorial service are pending and will be released on the funeral home's Web site at www.devargasfuneral.com.

Martinez is survived by his wife, Gloria Ann Martinez, and sons Marcos J. and Antonio M. Martinez, all of Nambé. He is also survived by his mother, Pablita Martinez; brothers Benito Martinez and David Martinez, all of Cordova; and numerous nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts and other relatives.

Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.