An Española man, who pleaded down to misdemeanor battery against a household member for allegedly holding his wife, daughter and a friend in his house against their will after they called the police on him, had his probation revoked and was sent to jail for the duration of his sentence after repeatedly trying to contact the victim.
Arturo Findel Nichols pleaded down to the misdemeanor battery charge on May 1. He was initially charged with three counts of false imprisonment, fourth degree felonies with 18-month sentences; two counts of petty misdemeanor battery, petty misdemeanor disorderly conduct and the battery against a household member charge.
Per his plea deal, the maximum sentence he faced if he violated probation was 364 days, which is the maximum for a misdemeanor.
District Judge Anastasia Martin revoked Nichols’s sentence on Dec. 29 and ordered him to serve his 364-day sentence, with credit for time served (20 days) and time spent on electronic monitoring (126 days) and ordered that he be unsatisfactorily discharged from probation.
He is set to be released from jail on July 15; his sentence was deemed to have started on Dec. 8.
Probation officers filed multiple reports documenting the violations of his probation, including that he texted the victim’s daughter to get the victim to talk to him, referred to as a third party contact.
Española City Police Officer Nicolas Lamendola wrote in a statement of probable cause for Nichols’s arrest that he was originally called to a house on East Bond Street at 10:06 p.m., Sept. 11, 2024, responding to a call from Nichols’s wife, who said she called because he was upset and “acting up.”
She told officers he was fine but an hour later, Lamendola was sent back to the house, where Nichols’s wife asked that her husband be placed on a “mental hold.” He denied going to the hospital but medics convinced him to go.
Lamendola went to the house a third time, shortly after midnight, when the woman called again and said her husband was being “extremely aggressive,” allegedly head butted her in the face, pushed his daughter and the daughter’s friend, and wouldn’t let any of them leave the house leading her to call 911 again, he wrote.
When Lamendola went to arrest him, he slowly fell to the floor and had to be carried out of the house. At the hospital, he “became irate and aggressive and yelling obscenities loudly,” the officer wrote.
Officers filed another case against him on May 14, 2025, two weeks after he pleaded down to the misdemeanor battery charge, and charged him with battery against a household member, false imprisonment and larceny between $500 and $2,500. That new magistrate court case was dismissed a month later on June 18, “pending further investigation.”
Española Officer Lucas Sanchez wrote in a criminal complaint for Nichols’s May arrest that he was sent to North Coronado Avenue for a domestic.
When he got there, he found the man’s wife with visible injuries to her face, including “fresh bruising and swelling to her left cheek.”
The wife told the officers that her husband beat her and took her phone and she didn’t feel like she could leave because he locked the doors and the gate to the property, but she was able to escape by unlocking the door and jumping the fence. She then ran from the house to a neighbor’s house on Coronado.
When officers went to the house and arrested Nichols, he told them he “had no idea of what happened to his wife” and that “his wife had fell (sic) and hit her face,” Sanchez wrote.