An Alcalde man will spend five years on supervised probation after pleading guilty to charges of armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for robbing a man of his shoes and phone at gunpoint in March 2024.
Ryan Romero, 21, signed the plea deal on Dec. 19, 2024, that gives him a conditional discharge if he successfully finishes five years of supervised probation. However, if he does not, he faces at least nine years on the armed robbery charge.
District Court Judge Jason Lidyard entered the conditional discharge sentence on Jan. 3. His sentencing conditions mandate that he is not allowed to drink and cannot possess any firearms.
As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dismissed a charge of conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
His alleged co-conspirator, Francisco Garcia, 19, of Española, still faces charges of armed robbery, assault with intent to commit a violent felony and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
Probation officers repeatedly asked that Garcia be held in jail after he failed to call probation officers as required, while his case is pending trial. A pre-trial hearing was set for March 3 with tentative jury selection set for April 7.
Alleged robbery
Española City Police Officer Anthony Martinez wrote in a statement of probable cause for Romero and Garcia’s initial arrests that on March 13, 2024 he was sent to El Rey Liquors for the report of a robbery.
The victim told Martinez that he was walking back and forth near the trash cans, talking on the phone, when a car pulled up and a man got out, walked up and asked him about his shoes. The man, later identified as Romero, then got aggressive and pulled up his shirt, showing Rodriguez a gun.
“(Victim) said that he told the male that he was on camera and the male replied, ‘I don’t give a (expletive),’” Martinez wrote.
Another man, wearing a bandanna and later identified as Garcia, got out and “threatened ‘to fold him in half’ with a shotgun that was in the back seat,” Martinez wrote.
The man described the pistol as a Taurus snub nose revolver and said he could see the rounds in the cylinder when Romero allegedly pulled it out of his pants, Martinez wrote.
One of the men then took the phone from the man and when he asked for it back, one of them told him to give him his shoes for his phone, Martinez wrote.
The shoes are identified in court documents as “Jordan red shoes.”
In surveillance footage taken from an adjacent business, one of the men is seen trying to take the man’s shoes before running back to their car, he wrote.
The same day, Romero and Garcia were arrested in a different case where officers found a tan shotgun and two revolvers, Martinez wrote.
That separate case was dismissed.
When Martinez interrogated Garcia, he allegedly said they got into an argument with the man.
When he interrogated Romero, he said he got into an argument but never pulled a gun, Martinez wrote.