A defense lawyer is accusing Española Police detectives and one prosecutor of colluding to pin the Aug. 22 murder of Ivan Garcia at the Fairview Sonic on an innocent man.
In a motion to dismiss a criminal complaint against Rocky Dixon, 21, of Española, lawyer Matt McKenna accused Española Police Lt. Christian Lopez of coaching two witnesses into providing false testimony before the Rio Arriba grand jury that indicted Dixon Oct. 7 for first degree murder and tampering with evidence.
McKenna, formerly a prosecutor for the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, filed the motion Dec. 15 at the state District courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, documents state. In the motion, McKenna also accused Española Police Det. Bryan Martinez of colluding with Lopez and Kathryn Thwaits, the former prosecutor then assigned to Dixon’s case, of conspiracy to bring a false indictment.
“You can quote me on this — Matt McKenna is full of (expletive),” Lopez said. “He may as well be accusing us of having shot Ivan Garcia ourselves. Rocky’s lawyer is a good example of some attorneys who have no ethics and will do anything just to win a case.”
Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Hill, who took over Dixon’s case after replacing Thwaits as the lead prosecutor at District Attorney’s Española office, called McKenna’s motion “a personal attack” and a “frivolous, vindictive diatribe” against Thwaits, Lopez and Martinez.
McKenna’s motion focuses on interviews Lopez recorded Sept. 3 with Aurora Muñoz and Javier Francisco Chavez, in which they claim to have witnessed the brawl between two gangs at the Fairview Sonic during which Dixon allegedly shot Garcia. Muñoz and Chavez told Lopez, and later testified before a grand jury, that they were stopped just north of the intersection of Fairview Lane and Riverside Drive when they saw a man they recognized as Dixon fire four shots at a group of men running away from him, according to McKenna’s motion.
McKenna points to one passage in the interview transcripts in which Lopez tells the Chavez “Okay, now I’m just going to break it down for you and then you just answer as I’ve explained to you, okay?”
“In fact, the transcripts show Detective Lopez telling Munoz and Chavez what they saw last night and how they saw it, and not the other way around,” McKenna wrote.
McKenna also pointed to inconsistencies between Munoz and Chavez’s testimony and evidence found at the crime scene.
Munoz and Chavez told the grand jury they saw Dixon shooting from under the well-lit Sonic carport, about 100 feet north of where police found four casings for the 9 mm shells that supposedly killed Garcia, McKenna wrote. The spot where Munoz and Chavez claim they saw Dixon standing is even farther from the dark, remote corner where Garcia’s girlfriend found him early the morning of Aug. 23, McKenna said.
“We don’t really know where the murder took place,” McKenna said Monday. “I would not be surprised if he’d been shot elsewhere, then dumped. Española Police needed these witnesses to say what they said because they have no new evidence gathered and collected, just the same old stuff they had way back when, which is nothing, just rumor.”
Lopez said evidence corroborates accounts other than Munoz and Chavez’s that Garcia was running from the parking lot and Dixon was walking toward him as he fired shots.
“We already had Rocky in custody, we already had the case put together, and (Munoz and Chavez) came after the fact,” Lopez said.
In a response filed Monday, Hill asked state District Judge Sheri Raphaelson to strike McKenna’s motion, saying it makes “unfounded and egregious accusations of not just bad faith but criminal activity” by Thwaits and fails to prove its claim that she conspired with Lopez and Martinez to present fabricated testimony.
By telling Munoz and Chavez he would “break down” the story for them, Lopez was not asking them to lie; he was only asking them to answer “Yes” and “No” to certain questions, Hill argued.
“It’s basic interrogation technique,” Lopez said. “It’s called interviewing — you don’t coach people, but when they start talking, you try to keep them moving along.”
The discrepancies McKenna pointed out do not by themselves indicate testimony was fabricated, Hill wrote.
“As this Court knows and as the Defense attorney should know, testimony often differs from other witnesses’ testimony sometimes in favor of the State, sometimes in favor of the Defendant,” Hill wrote.
Española acting city attorney Paula Maynes said the Police Department would not take McKenna’s allegations as the basis for an internal investigation unless state District Court Judge Raphaelson sided with McKenna.
“If we acted on every allegation made against a police officer in every court filing, we’d have no one patrolling the streets,” Maynes said.
Dixon is being held in the Santa Fe County Jail on a $250,000 bond, according to jail staff. A pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Feb. 4, according to an online court records database.
Thwaits could not be reached for comment.