Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies charged a 36-year-old Española man with two counts of child abuse after he allegedly overdosed in his car, parked in the middle of the road, with his two children inside.
Sgt. Jonathan Coriz wrote in a criminal complaint for Stephen Winston’s arrest that on Feb. 22, he was sent to County Road 89 in Chimayó after multiple people called 911 to report a man passed out in a running vehicle with two small children in the back seat, crying for help.
When Coriz got to the scene, he saw Winston unconscious in the drivers seat of a black Nissan Frontier, parked in the middle of County Road 89. The two children who had been in the car had already been removed by witnesses, who took them to a nearby house. Coriz turned the car off and administered three doses of naloxone via a nasal spray. These had a “positive response” and Winston was “removed from the vehicle,” Coriz wrote.
Before getting Winston out of the car, he saw a smoking pipe in his left land, a lighter and the pipe had blue residue which he opined was from fentanyl, he wrote.
One witness told him that the car had been parked in the road for 30 minutes but it only got his attention when he saw the children screaming for help and crying inside, he wrote.
Coriz charged Winston with two counts of child abuse.
Winston was issued a summons for his arraignment, set for April 7.