Charges in Abiquiú case dismissed
A North Carolina woman who was arrested in Abiquiú, then released after prosecutors dismissed charges against her, and before New Mexico State Police officers filed an arrest warrant on charges of aggravated battery for allegedly attacking workers at a rest stop, is having competency determined in her Mora County case.
Kelsey Pittman, 34, of Sneads Ferry, North Carolina, was arrested on Oct. 29 on the State Police warrant out of Mora County, charging her with two counts of aggravated battery and one count each of unlawful taking a vehicle, breaking and entering and unauthorized graffiti.
State Police Officer Julio Orona investigated her alleged attack on two rest stop cleaners on Oct. 10, a day before she was arrested at the Family Dollar in Abiquiú, but didn’t file charges until Oct. 24, after she was released from the Tierra Amarilla Detention Center.
Orona wrote that Pittman allegedly threw bleach in the face of one of the cleaners, following an argument with her, after finding her in a decommissioned bathroom in the I-25 rest stop. As she tried to escape from him, she went to the cleaners’ Toyota Tacoma truck, which was running. They tried to stop her, but she allegedly pulled out a hunting knife and cut one on their forearm, before driving away.
In Mora County, Magistrate Judge Cindy Garza set her bail at $20,000, cash-only.
A day before a preliminary examination in the case was set to start, her court-appointed attorney filed a motion on Nov. 24 for a forensic evaluation to determine Pittman’s competency, and the case was transferred to district court for the competency evaluation the following day.
The question of competency puts the case on pause and will keep Pittman in custody until her competency is determined.
When she was arrested in Abiquiú, she told deputies that she thought they were “working with the ops on the navigator app” and that after her arrest, she believed they were trying to “send me to the black web” where she believed another man was trying to sell her and other girls on the “navigator” app, Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Deputy Dennis Martinez wrote in a criminal complaint for her Oct. 10 arrest.
She also claimed staff at Family Dollar “cleaned out their entire cell phone section when I was trying to buy a cell phone, cause they followed me here,” he wrote.
There is no indication of when a competency determination will be made.
According to media reports from July, she was found in Colorado eight months after disappearing from North Carolina and she had lost spoken to her family in November 2024, when she was in Death Valley National Park in California.
There, they found her abandoned car, but couldn’t find her, and her disappearance was covered by USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, People magazine and CBS News.