An Española man is accused of ramming his car into a police vehicle following a chase while a drunk 17-year-old girl was in the passenger seat on Feb. 20.
A day after his arrest, prosecutors petitioned a judge to have Axel Lopez Tolano, 22, held without bail pending trial as a danger to the community.
Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Deputy Andres Sanchez charged Tolano with aggravated battery on an officer, aggravated DWI, aggravated fleeing an officer, aggravated assault on an officer, driving on a revoked license, no evidence of registration and no proof of insurance.
Sanchez wrote in a criminal complaint for Tolano’s arrest that at 12:11 a.m., he spotted three vehicles leaving the north parking lot of a community center on County Road 10 and one of them, a red Honda Civic, drove past stop signs, in an apparent attempt to flee. Sanchez did not write why he was trying to initially pull the vehicle over.
Another deputy tried to get behind the Civic to get it to stop, but it would not. Another deputy coming from the opposite direction stopped on the side of the road and the driver of the car revved the engine and accelerated, hitting the front driver’s-side push guard, as the deputy tried to reverse to not get hit, Sanchez wrote.
The Civic sped up again, and then slid off the road and into an embankment, he wrote.
“The driver opened up the driver side door and put his hands in the air,” Sanchez wrote.
Sanchez and another deputy handcuffed Tolano while pointing a stun gun at him. In the car, they found a 17-year-old girl who agreed with Sanchez’s supposition that they had been drinking “buzz balls” and that a person named “Evo Stevo” had given it to them and that this person was “trying to ‘get with her cousin’ or words to that effect that was approximately 12 years old,” Sanchez wrote.
Tolano told Sanchez he wanted a lawyer and refused alcohol testing. Inside the car, registered in Colorado, they saw a “large” empty bottle of tequila.
First Judicial District Attorney’s Office prosecutor Kent Wahlquist filed a motion a day following Tolano’s arrest to have him held without bail, pending trial, as a danger to the community.
Aside from the current case, where Tolano allegedly rammed a deputy’s cruiser, he was arrested on Feb. 10, 2024, on a drunk driving charge. In that case, deputies paced Tolano going 93 mph on Fairview Lane, from the Taos Lane to McCurdy intersections, while he also allegedly ran through a stop sign.
His blood-alcohol level in that case was breath tested at 0.13, while the legal per se limit is 0.08, Wahlquist wrote.
In that case, officers spotted a “large” bottle of vodka on the vehicle’s floor, he wrote.
An initial pre-trial hearing wasn’t scheduled until almost a year later, followed by a bench warrant being issued on Feb. 11, 2025, when Tolano allegedly failed to appear in court, according to court records.
A combined preliminary hearing and dangerousness hearing is set for Thursday (3/6) in district court in Tierra Amarilla, according to court records.