After New Mexico State Police officers charged a Canjilon woman with aggravated burglary for allegedly breaking into her dead mother’s house and trying to take a rifle that her other family members declared did not belong to her, she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal trespass.
Alysia Leyba, 19, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge on Nov. 4 and received a sentence of 364 days of supervised probation.
Among the conditions of her plea agreement, she is not allowed to go to her mother’s house in Lumberton.
A plea deal in the case was initially scheduled for March 6, 2025, which was then set out to March 20, set out again to May 1, then not held. She failed to appear for a docket call on Sept. 2, was arrested in Colorado on the bench warrant for her failure to appear sometime in September and was not released until Oct. 20, while prosecutor Stu de Haan sought to have her jailed pending trial because she missed the court hearing.
Instead, the judge ordered her to be released on Oct. 21 and then she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge on Nov. 4.
Aggravated burglary, the initial charge, is a third degree felony with a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
New Mexico State Police Officer Dominic Garcia wrote in a statement of probable cause for Leyba’s arrest that he was first sent to a house on U.S. Highway 64 in Lumberton for a case of trespassing on Nov. 11, 2024. It was called in by a family member, in Albuquerque, who said she learned that her niece was inside her sister’s house, but no one was allowed to be inside.
Leyba’s uncle, Adrian Herrera, was at the house and told officers they changed the locks and sealed the house after his sister’s death. When he approached the house, he saw his niece inside, carrying out a black tote bag and a rifle, Garcia wrote.
Herrera tried to grab the bag from her, the handles ripped off and Leyba grabbed the rifle and left. While he claimed that some items from the house had been laid out on the bed, nothing was missing, Garcia wrote.
When Garcia interrogated Leyba, she waived her right to remain silent and told him that she went to the house to get the rifle because her mom gave it to her three years prior. When she found that her keys didn’t work, she climbed in through a window that she pried open with a rake, he wrote.