A Santa Fe man, who allegedly threatened his mother’s neighbor with a knife and told him he was going to kill him, surrendered to Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies as they were on the precipice of breaking into the apartment he was holed up in.
Deputy Joey Graves charged Ricky Martinez, 30, on Feb. 23, with one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The victim, said he was walking over to Martinez’s mother’s apartment to tell him goodbye, because he was moving out, when Martinez allegedly came out yelling with a knife in his hand, saying he was going to kill the man, Graves wrote in a criminal complaint for Martinez’s arrest.
Deputies tried using a loudspeaker to get Martinez out of the apartment. Then his aunt came and tried to get him to come out. Then his mother called him and another deputy tried to convince him to come out of the apartment. When he did, Martinez allegedly claimed he was in Santa Fe with his girlfriend.
“Deputy Martinez gave Ricky several more commands to come out of his mother’s apartment before we went in,” Graves wrote. “Mr. Martinez then started yelling saying he wasn’t in the apartment, that he was in Santa Fe.”
When a deputy asked for proof, Martinez allegedly changed his voice to make it seem like it was a woman speaking on the phone. The deputy gave Graves the phone and he promised Martinez that he would be safe if he came out and that he would personally arrest him. That convinced Martinez to come out of the apartment with his hands up, Graves wrote.
Once inside the patrol car, Martinez started to slam his head into the door and the cage in the backseat, before he was transported to the hospital, and then to the Tierra Amarilla Detention Center.
Rio Arriba Magistrate Judge Alexandra Naranjo ordered him released on his personal recognizance the following day, but ordered that he be on pre-trial supervision and that he wear a GPS bracelet for tracking purposes.
In a March 4 filing, pre-trial services officer Joe Marquez wrote that they don’t assign GPS bracelets to track anyone. Someone needs to be on house arrest, have an exclusion zone or have a curfew to be monitored. A hearing on that issue was set for later in March.
Warrant arrest
Following his arrest, he was served with a bench warrant from 2022 in a robbery and aggravated battery case from 2021. In that case, he failed to appear in court for a hearing on April 20, 2022. The case was on pause until his arrest in February.
Former Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Vigil wrote in an affidavit for an arrest warrant that he was sent to the Dollar Store in Abiquiú on Dec. 14, 2021. When he got there, he saw two store employees holding wet clothes to their faces.
Employee Shane Watson told Vigil that a man came into the store, filled up a bag with stuff and tried to leave. Watson tried to stop him and the man pulled out a can of pepper spray, spraying him in the face. The other employee was nearby and was hit in the neck, Vigil wrote.
Days later, one employee told Vigil she was still suffering from chemical burns from the pepper spray, he wrote.
Another witness told Vigil that she saw the man take two guns “or something else” out of his waistband and put them in the truck he fled in before getting in.
After getting a better photo of the man, Vigil was able to identify him as Martinez, with the help of probation officers.
That case was also set for a hearing on the applicability of GPS bracelets for later in March.
Martinez was also arrested on a bench warrant in a burglary case from 2018 in District Court that was put on pause in 2022, after he failed to appear for a status conference on June 27, 2022. In that case, he is charged with residential burglary, larceny between $500 and $2,500 and receiving stolen property.