Nearly a year after drug trafficking charges were brought and then dismissed in magistrate court, a Rio Arriba grand jury indicted an Española man, on Jan. 8, for drug trafficking and felon in possession of a firearm.
Christopher Chacon, 39, is set to be arraigned later this week in Tierra Amarilla District Court.
He was wanted on a bench warrant in another case, where he was accused of shooting at two people from their own house after he kicked them out. He was wanted on that bench warrant from Nov. 17, after he failed to appear at a hearing, but District Judge Anastasia Martin quashed it on Jan. 13, after it appears to have been served.
She wrote that “Defendant is currently hospitalized and is not cleared for incarceration and will not be cleared in the immediate future.”
In the new case, indicted on Jan. 8, 2026, Chacon was arrested on Jan. 3, 2025, after Española police were called to Walgreens for a report of a man who had been trespassed, harassing customers and saying, “I’m going to come back and shoot someone,” Detective Dwayne Epling wrote in a criminal complaint for his 2025 arrest.
Detectives got a search warrant for his car and found 72 grams of suspected fentanyl powder, a purple Ruger EC9s pistol, $2,411 in cash, three scales and plastic bags.
Prosecutors dismissed that case a month later, on Feb. 12, 2025, before bringing it to a grand jury a year later on Jan. 8, 2026.
In the other case, where the judge dismissed the warrant because Chacon’s health is too bad to send him to jail, he waived a preliminary hearing on charges of trafficking and felon in possession of a firearm in exchange for prosecutors dropping two charges of attempted murder and one count of shooting at a vehicle.
In that case, from Sept. 29, 2025, prosecutors initially tried to get him held without bail as a danger to the community.
He allegedly shot at the two people who had been letting him stay at their house, after kicking them out at gunpoint when they tried to start a conversation about him paying rent. Deputies found two bullet holes in the car the people were in when Chacon allegedly opened fire and retrieved one bullet, as well as a shell casing.
A trial in that case had been set for March 9, but that was canceled and no new trial date has been set.