A district judge sentenced a Littleton, Colorado woman on Dec. 1 to 30 years in prison, after she was convicted a year ago on two charges of vehicular homicide caused by driving under the influence for the 2020 deaths of two people.
District Judge Jason Lidyard sentenced Cory Johnson, formerly of Tierra Azul, for the deaths of Justice Gutierrez-Cruz and Felisha Barela, according to a social media post from the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office. The sentencing outcome had not been posted to the court’s website by presstime.
A jury convicted her of the two charges a year ago, on Dec. 10, 2024.
According to a 2024 press release from the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office and court documents, a blood draw following the crash that killed Barela and Gutierrez-Cruz showed Johnson has alcohol, oxycodone, Xanax and nordiazepam in her system.
A crash reconstruction found Johnson was driving 66-68 mph when she veered into oncoming traffic, hitting the victim’s car head-on.
Gutierrez-Cruz and Barela, who were dating, were killed just a half hour after Gutierrez-Cruz dropped her son off with her grandmother, as they headed to a camping trip for her birthday.
Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Deputy Dwayne Epling, now with the Española Police Department, filed charges for two counts of vehicular homicide against Johnson, living in Tierra Azul at the time, after the June 28, 2020 crash. Epling wrote in a criminal complaint that he interviewed a person who was driving behind Gutierrez-Cruz’s and Barela’s car.
The man told Epling that he watched Johnson’s car veer into the opposite lane of traffic and hit the other car head-on, Epling wrote.
While emergency responders pulled Barela out of the car and tried performing CPR, Gutierrez-Cruz was trapped inside the vehicle and had no pulse when Epling arrived, he wrote.
Emergency responders took Johnson, who was bloody but conscious and babbling, to the Española Hospital. She was then flown by helicopter to The University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. A failure to appear warrant was issued in September 2020 and it was served on April 8, 2021 when she was listed as being in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
Prosecutor Julie Gallardo dismissed the case on April 8, 2021 “pending further investigation.” She refiled the case on Sept. 6, 2022 and Prosecutor Kent Wahlquist then dismissed it again on Dec. 1, 2022, “pending further contact with witnesses.” Wahlquist refiled the charges seven days later, on Dec. 8, 2022, followed by a preliminary hearing on Feb. 29, 2023, where the case was bound over to district court on two counts of vehicular homicide DWI.
In a letter to the district court judge, Rio Arriba Magistrate Judge Joseph Madrid wrote that the prosecutor presented evidence that Johnson was intoxicated at the time of the crash.
In the press release, these delays were described as a function of Johnson recovering from her injuries and the time it took to get the results of the blood tests back.
Motion to
Dismiss
Johnson’s attorney tried to get the case dismissed on the grounds that the only person who could testify that the blood draw was Johnson’s, was New Mexico State Police Officer Toby LaFave, who was implicated in the federal drunk driving bribery scandal where State Police officers were offered payouts to get cases dismissed. LaFave was quietly fired on Oct. 29, according to a TV news report by KRQE. He was also added to the list of officers who aren’t credible to testify in the Second Judicial District and is under federal investigation.
LaFave has not been charged with a crime.
While a hearing was held on that issue on Oct. 27, no order granting or dismissing the order has been entered into the court record and the docket does not indicate if the judge ruled orally from the bench.
Remembering Gutierrez-Cruz
In a 2023 interview, Gutierrez-Cruz’s grandmother, Caroline Esquivel, said her granddaughter taught children’s cheerleading for three years, evidence of her love of working with children.
“The community really lost when we lost her,” she said.
She described her granddaughter as caring, partially because she was raised around the 12-step program.
“She had a lot of compassion and empathy for others,” she said. “She always wanted to help.”
Barela and Gutierrez-Cruz had moved in together just a month before they were killed in the crash.
“Justice loved music, she loved people, and she was very outgoing,” the Esquivel said. “She used to like singing, used to do a lot of karaoke. My granddaughter, she had a lot of life in her she just, she had a lot of love, she wanted to include everybody.”
Lawsuit
Esquivel filed a lawsuit over her granddaughter’s death and just before the case was set to go to trial in March 2024, it appears to have been settled. The order dismissing the case and approving the settlement for Gutierrez-Cruz’s son was sealed by District Judge Matthew Wilson, because if the settlement agreement with the state for its alleged negligence in allowing fatal crashes to continue happening on U.S. Highway 84 was public, it would cause the child “serious and significant injury.”
What hypothetical injury it would case is not listed in the boilerplate motion to seal the documents.