{"id":47026,"date":"2025-05-15T14:30:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T21:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/?p=47026"},"modified":"2025-05-16T13:17:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T20:17:23","slug":"protect-and-serve-did-county-officials-enable-ryan-martinezs-violent-actions-at-a-2023-protest-in-espanola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/protect-and-serve-did-county-officials-enable-ryan-martinezs-violent-actions-at-a-2023-protest-in-espanola\/","title":{"rendered":"Protect and serve: Did county officials enable Ryan Martinez\u2019s violent actions at a 2023 protest in Espa\u00f1ola?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Two survivors have filed suit against Rio Arriba County office-holders, alleging that their civil rights were violated when they failed to control dangerous conflicts surrounding the proposed reinstallation of a statue depicting Juan de O\u00f1ate<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This story<\/a> was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico<\/a>, a NMPBS partner.<\/strong><\/em> For more, Joshua Bowling recently sat down with Jacob Johns to discuss his case on New Mexico in Focus.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At the 2023 protest, activists placed offerings by a concrete slab that was meant to serve as the base for the statue. Courtesy of Mariel Nanasi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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By Joshua Bowling, Searchlight New Mexico<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Espa\u00f1ola protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de O\u00f1ate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez\u2019s violent outburst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O\u2019odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff\u2019s office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff\u2019s deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen \u201cleaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jacob Johns outside the Roundhouse in Santa Fe on May 12. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county\u2019s proposal to install a statue of O\u00f1ate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Espa\u00f1ola. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez\u2019s path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere were no sheriff\u2019s deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,\u201d the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Espa\u00f1ola, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Espa\u00f1ola safe on that September morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI would like to see the police do their job,\u201d Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. \u201cI was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn\u2019t even the sheriff\u2019s office that apprehended the shooter \u2014 it was tribal police.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the shooting, a warning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield \u2014 who died in April of this year \u2014 emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the O\u00f1ate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. O\u00f1ate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of O\u00f1ate\u2019s statue was cut off by a group that called<\/a> itself the Friends of Acoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the summer of 2020, county workers removed the O\u00f1ate sculpture from its perch in Alcalde. Courtesy of Eddie Moore\/Albuquerque Journal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Commissioners planned to install the statue \u2014 which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side \u2014 at a new location: the county complex in Espa\u00f1ola. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with \u201cdeadly force, which can turn into legal liability\/tort claims for the county.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRespectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBy choosing to relocate the Don Juan de O\u00f1ate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johns\u2019 and Peixinho\u2019s cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff\u2019s deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as \u201cdarting back and forth\u201d and \u201cacting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.\u201d \u201cDue to Martinez\u2019s disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,\u201d the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff \u201cthen overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.\u201d Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day\u2019s potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff\u2019s Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey were deliberately indifferent,\u201d Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads<\/a> New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe\u2013based renewable-energy advocacy group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd\u2019s murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo \u2014 whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the O\u00f1ate statue back in the 1990s \u2014 said<\/a> the statue wouldn\u2019t go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the O\u00f1ate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho\u2019s lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A long road to recovery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez\u2019s bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes \u2014 in his pancreas and liver \u2014 for six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it\u2019s like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up \u2014 only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,\u201d he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard \u201cinternal journey toward healing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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