Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies arrested an Española woman on a warrant, Jan. 7, for failure to appear for a status conference on three counts of child abuse.
Rachel Montoya, 39, has been wanted on the warrant since she failed to appear for a magistrate court status conference on Sept. 24. She was initially arrested on Aug. 14. A preliminary examination was set for Aug. 27, where a judge was supposed to hear the evidence and decide what charges to dismiss or bind over to District Court.
Rio Arriba Magistrate Judge Joseph Madrid previously ordered her to be held without bail after she was charged with resisting arrest, following the child abuse arrest, for allegedly refusing to come out of a house for 20-30 minutes after police surrounded it, while they were looking for someone else, even though they didn’t have a warrant.
She was held without bail for nine days before Magistrate Judge Alexandra Naranjo ordered her to be released nine days later on Aug. 27. Madrid held an evidentiary hearing for the alleged violation of her condition of release the day before but did not release her, but filed no documents stating why. Prosecutors then dismissed the misdemeanor resisting charge on Oct. 3.
The father of one of the children, Jeremy Montoya, who was not at the scene, was issued a summons for one count of child abuse. Prosecutors dismissed the charge against him one day after he was arraigned, while the case against Rachel Montoya is moving forward.
According to online court dockets, petitions have been filed for temporary guardians to take custody of three of her children.
The Case
Española City Police Officer Andrew O’Hara wrote in court documents that he was sent to an Española house for a welfare check on four children who were, according to the caller, living in the house with 15 other people and that the conditions were “unacceptable.”
There were bags of “waste” in the yard, machinery that was “destroyed” and a dog that was tied up and not able to move more than a single foot, he wrote in his incident report. O’Hara didn’t mention the dog in court documents and did not write if he called animal control to check on the animal, which he described as being crippled. He did not file animal abuse charges.
Two older girls told O’Hara they were fine and two younger boys told him they were fine but appeared to be dirty. Rachel Montoya told O’Hara that they were working on cleaning the house and it’s a four or five bedroom house and there were seven adults and four children living there regularly, with two other adults who stayed sometimes, he wrote.
O’Hara and Officer Dustin Chavez walked through the house. They saw holes in the floor, empty kitchen cabinets, a sink filled with dirty dishes, a large container on the floor filled with dirty dishes, the only food in the refrigerator was covered in mold and “trash all over the floor throughout” with food smeared all over the walls, O’Hara wrote.
The bathroom was filled with dirty laundry “and could barely fit a person to the toilet” while the laundry room was filled with dirty laundry, he wrote.