Chief defends officers in Cruces shooting
Suspect ‘lunged’ at police with a knife
LAS CRUCES — Police Chief Jaime Montoya defended his officers’ use of deadly force in the fatal shooting Sunday of a robbery suspect, saying the man “lunged at the officers” with a knife. A grainy cellphone video of the incident taken by a witness seems to show the suspect walking away from police.
On Monday, police identified the suspect as 36-yearold Juan Gabriel Torres of Las Cruces. “Multiple shots were fired” by more than one officer, Montoya said. Torres died of his injuries at a hospital.
Torres — who had multiple felonies on his record dating back to 2002 for aggravated battery, kidnapping and other crimes, as well as numerous probation violations — stole a white Chevy pickup, later abandoned it in the middle of a busy thoroughfare and threatened officers with a large hunting knife when they arrived on the scene, Montoya said told a news conference Monday.
“When he lunged at the officers, they were forced to use deadly force,” Montoya said. “We do feel that once you see the knife, and you see what our officers were faced within feet, then they had the right to use that deadly force.”
A witness captured the shooting on a cellphone camera and uploaded it to his Facebook page. In the video, three police officers surround the man, who appears to be walking away from them; shots are fired and he collapses to the ground.
A woman’s voice over the video says, “Does he have a gun out tambien?” — also — and the woman gasps as six shots ring out.
Asked whether he believes the video shows the suspect
moving away from the officers, Montoya said, “That’s not what we got from the video, plus our video shows a lot clearer what occurred. I think if you put the video that we have of the body-worn camera along with the video on Facebook, you can see how clear the officers reacted to that threat.”
Montoya said that the officers were carrying Tasers and that video from a body-worn camera would be released at a later date.
Police responded around 3 p.m. Sunday to a report of the stolen white Chevy pickup on busy Lohman Avenue, a main east-west artery in Las Cruces. Around 4:30 p.m., according to LCPD spokesman Dan Trujillo, officers saw the same Chevy pickup drive past the scene of a robbery. They pursued the truck.
Police lost the vehicle in heavy traffic then located it again where it was abandoned on Lohman Avenue at the overpass over I-25. They saw the suspect “armed with a large knife, and he was seen drinking from a beer bottle,” Trujillo said.
“Officers ordered Torres to drop the knife, but he refused to do so,” Trujillo said. “Officers then fired on the suspect when he lunged toward one of the officers.”
The fatal shooting occurred just as the funeral for fallen Hatch police officer Jose Chavez was ending at the Pan American Center on the campus of New Mexico State University. Hundreds of law enforcement officers and agents mourned Chavez in a service attended by Gov. Susana Martinez, U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez and Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., among other dignitaries.
Asked whether officers may have reacted emotionally, given the funeral for Chavez, who was shot dead during a traffic stop, Montoya said, “I don’t believe so. They reacted professionally, according to their training.”
The officers involved in the incident are expected to be placed on three days of paid administrative leave, Montoya said. LCPD officers receive use-of-force training on “a constant basis,” he said.