A judge revoked an Española woman’s suspended sentence after she pleaded down to a misdemeanor from a felony charge of forgery.
District Judge Anastasia Martin revoked Brianna Vialpando’s sentence on Nov. 6, following a request from prosecutors on Sept. 29, after probation officers alleged that she never reported to them and they couldn’t find where she was living.
She must serve the duration of her 364-day sentence.
Vialpando pleaded guilty to attempted forgery, a misdemeanor, on Aug. 21, after she was bound over on a felony charge of forgery between $2,500 and $20,000 and a misdemeanor charge of resisting an officer on Nov. 5, 2024.
According to the judgment and sentence, Vialpando had to complete 24 hours of community service and be assessed for alcohol and drug abuse and follow the recommendations of her probation officer.
Handwritten into the margins of the deal is a line that says if she completed all her treatment and community service requirements, she could convert her sentence of 364 days of supervised probation to unsupervised probation.
Probation Officer Amada Trujillo wrote in a Sept. 25 major violations report that Vialpando called the Española Adult Probation and Parole Office multiple times explaining that she would show up and report for her supervised probation, but she never did.
Probation officers sent a letter to her last known address on Sept. 22 and went to that same address but “were unable to verify the residence, no contact was made.” Three days later, they checked local jail logs and hospitals and still couldn’t find her, Trujillo wrote.
“All attempts to contact Probationer Vialpando have been unsuccessful and she has failed to report as instructed therefore she had been declared an absconder,” Trujillo wrote.
She was arrested three times in the case: when bank clerks called police on her after she tried to cash a check that clerks thought was forged, and then twice while her case was pending for her failure to appear for court hearings. She did not have any missed hearings after her case was bound over to district court.
Fraudulent Check
Española City Police Officer Donivan Byers wrote in a statement of probable cause for Vialpando’s arrest that someone at Century Bank on North Riverside Drive called police on Jan. 24, 2024. The bank manager told Byers that a woman tried to cash a check for $8,000 and when bank tellers called the owners of the bank account, they told the tellers they never wrote the check.
The manager told Byers that the woman, identified as Vialpando, was outside the bank, trying to jumpstart her car, which is where Byers arrested her.
She was charged with unlawfully taking a vehicle, in April 2023, which had been impounded at a crime scene and was unlocked, with the keys inside. That case was dismissed a month later by prosecutors pending further investigation and was never refiled.