A 19-year-old Santa Fe woman is facing a felony charge of child abuse and misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery on a household member and aggravated drunk driving after she allegedly crashed her boyfriend’s car into a ditch after biting his neck.
Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Deputy Hansel Felix arrested Brianna Willebrand on May 8, after being called to a crash off of U.S. Highway 84/285.
In a criminal complaint for her arrest, Felix wrote that he spotted the vehicle she was reported to be driving, a gold SUV, crashed on the side of the road and he and another deputy got out and approached it. She appeared passed out behind the steering wheel, with the vehicle on, he wrote.
“When Willebrand saw me approaching, she raised the volume of the radio,” he wrote.
Felix instructed the other deputy to get the spike strips and put them behind her car’s rear tires in case she drove off. He then approached the driver’s side and had her get out, he wrote.
“As she exited, she began to stumble, and I could smell the odor of an intoxicating beverage emitting from her exhaled breath,” he wrote. “When asked if she had anything to drink, she stated she has a “Smirnoff smasher,” a type of alcoholic drink, she stated she had consumed only one.”
She told Felix she got into an argument with her boyfriend at the house, they got into the car and started to leave before crashing. While talking to her, he saw a 6-month-old infant in a “poorly secured car seat” and called the Children Youth and Families Department to take custody of the child, Felix wrote.
The boyfriend, Gustavo Mendoza, had previously walked away from the scene but the other deputy brought him back. After another deputy and a livestock agent arrived, Mendoza told them that they got into an argument at the house and Willebrand allegedly attacked him, biting him on the right side of his neck, leaving teeth impressions and breaking the skin, he wrote.
Mendoza said after the attack, they got into the car and drove down the driveway and Willebrand, in the passenger seat, threw his phone at the window as he drove. He stopped and got out to find his phone and when he did, she jumped into the driver’s seat, “made an aggressive turn, driving into several fences off the shoulder to where she was located.” He told them she drank four to five of the “smashers,” he wrote.
Willebrand consented to a series of field sobriety tests, which she failed. She refused a breath test, he wrote.
The following day, Rio Arriba Magistrate Judge Alexandra Naranjo ordered Willebrand released on her own recognizance but her to be placed on pretrial supervision and be forced to breathe into a machine that checks for alcohol on her breath, according to court documents.
Pretrial services submitted a request on May 22 for a hearing to the judge, writing that Willebrand had been set up with the remote breath test machine, but she had missed six required tests and failed to call the office as scheduled.
A hearing on the issue is set for Wednesday (6/4).