Española City Police officers arrested a homeless couple for breaking and entering a house to stay out of the cold, after the officers went to investigate a door that appeared to be slightly ajar.
Officer Andrew O’Hara charged Seleena Ochoa, 29, with breaking and entering and charged her companion, Lorenzo Rizo, 24, with breaking and entering, possession of methamphetamine and possession of cocaine, on Nov. 27.
While officers took Rizo to the Tierra Amarilla Detention Center, Ochoa was released and issued a summons to appear for an arraignment, after staff at the Española Hospital declared that she was unfit to be incarcerated because she is pregnant.
Ochoa is now wanted on a bench warrant after she failed to appear for her arraignment on Dec. 29, in Española Magistrate Court.
The bench warrant signed by Magistrate Judge Alexandra Naranjo orders Ochoa to be held without bail pending a court hearing.
It appears from court documents that Ochoa was assigned a court date after she was released from the hospital, and that the notice of her court date, which she missed, was mailed to her last known address in Medanales, although she appears to be homeless.
Naranjo ordered Rizo to report to pre-trial services when she arraigned him four days after his Dec. 1 arrest. She extended the time prosecutors have to put on a preliminary hearing by 60 days, on Dec. 24, because Rizo doesn’t have an attorney.
Naranjo ordered that Rizo apply to the Law Offices of the Public Defender for an attorney within 10 days of his initial arraignment and she required him to pay the application fee. While the court clerk initialed that a copy of the order for the public defender to represent Rizo was sent to their office, how it was sent was not filled out.
A preliminary hearing for Rizo is currently set for Wednesday (1/7).
The Arrests
O’Hara wrote in a criminal complaint for the pair’s arrest that he was doing “courtesy rounds” at 606-A Calle Rivera, which appears to either be a doublewide trailer or a similarly sized house, locked behind a fence and gate, when he saw the back door was slightly open “as if it were pried.”
O’Hara did not write who asked him to do the courtesy rounds, why, or if the building is abandoned.
He went to the door, pushed it closed, then opened it and went into the house with another officer. They heard thuds from a bedroom and found Ochoa and Rizo lying under a mattress and box frame. He pulled his stun gun on both of them, handcuffed them and started to interrogate them in the empty house, he wrote.
Rizo told him they were hiding because 15 minutes earlier, there was someone in the house and they didn’t know who it was and they didn’t know O’Hara was a cop. He said during the interrogation, that they had been in the house since the previous night because it was cold outside, at which point Ochoa told him to stop talking, he wrote.
When O’Hara searched Rizo, he found two folded-up foil squares, one with a clear rock-like substance he presumed to be methamphetamine and another with a “white dinosaur” pill Rizo told him could be crack cocaine, O’Hara wrote.
While he tried to send Ochoa to jail, staff at the Española hospital did not clear her for incarceration because she is pregnant and O’Hara was forced instead to issue her a summons.
Past Cases
Ochoa pleaded down to misdemeanor charges of child abandonment and resisting arrest in two separate district court filed consecutively in 2025 and received a suspended sentence with two years of supervised probation.
In one case, from a 2024 incident, she was charged with child abuse resulting in great bodily harm for allegedly allowing her 10-month old to ingest fentanyl.
In that case, she brought the child to the hospital, a doctor administered naloxone and the child started to breathe better, according to past SUN reports.
In another case from December 2024, bound over as possession of a controlled substance, Ochoa was found burning something near a dumpster and told officers she was just trying to keep warm. In response, O’Hara began trying to arrest her on a petty misdemeanor charge of improper handling of fire, the officer wrote in 2024.
After she put her hands in her pockets, O’Hara demanded she remove them, then pulled his gun on her until she dropped to the ground, hiding her hands, face and head. Holding a stun gun on her, O’Hara arrested her for petty misdemeanor improper handling of fire, petty misdemeanor concealing identity, misdemeanor resisting arrest and misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia and then, after searching her because he was arresting her, found suspected drugs and charged her then with possession of a controlled substance, a felony, he wrote.