A Dixon man who threatened his neighbor with a rifle pleaded guilty to a single charge of felon in possession of a firearm on Jan. 9.
Timothy Vigil, 72, received a suspended sentence of three years, to be served on supervised probation, with an agreement that if he doesn’t re-offend within the first 18 months, the following 18 months can be converted to unsupervised probation.
New Mexico State Police officers arrested Vigil on April 23, after his neighbor called 911 and said he had been cleaning outside with his backhoe, along with three other people and a 2-year-old child, when an irate Vigil started yelling at them from his house and then pointed a black AR-15-style rifle at them.
The two other adults corroborated the neighbor’s account, State Police Officer Louie Martinez wrote in a statement of probable cause for his arrest.
Witnesses handed over a video to the State Police officer of Vigil yelling “Hey!” multiple times, but the video shows no gun.
Vigil told Martinez that he was upset because his neighbor told him he wanted to fight. When asked if he pointed a gun at them, he said he didn’t, but that he does have an AR-15-style rifle that he didn’t bring out, Martinez wrote.
A woman in Vigil’s house told Martinez that they have an ongoing property boundary issue with the neighbor, he wrote.
When Martinez ran Vigil’s information, he realized the man had previously been convicted of a felony, with probation that ended in 2019. Vigil’s daughters then arrived at the scene and told the officer that Vigil had been pardoned. He gave the family a “reasonable amount of time” to find the paperwork, but they were unable to. He then seized the gun and arrested Vigil, Martinez wrote.
Vigil pleaded guilty in 2017 to tampering with evidence, according to court records.
He was initially charged with tampering with evidence and aggravated assault for allegedly attacking different neighbors who were trying to fix a fence and then pulling a knife on them, according to court records.
According to the plea deal, Vigil was convicted in 2005 of aggravated assault on an officer in Los Lunas County.
District Judge Anastasia Martin, who accepted the plea deal, sentenced him per its terms and entered her judgment and sentence on Jan. 13.