Mom glad she’s ‘got a memory block’
Maybe it’s a blessing she remembers nothing about the time police say her son beat her, stabbed her, choked her, attempted to slit her throat, then, when none of that killed her, tossed her off a bridge into the Rio Grande.
He thought she was a clone, he told detectives.
“Thank the Lord I’ve got a memory block,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing.”
Her name is Hope, though there are days she feels she has none. She fears the case against her son, Martin Mon- taño, has been forgotten, or, maybe worse, that it hasn’t been and that at some point she may have to testify against him and be in the same courtroom with him.
It’s been nearly four years since the attack on June 4,
2013.
Hope Porras hasn’t seen her son since then.
“I can’t,” she said, her voice breaking. “I just can’t.”
Porras talks with me now because she wants some assurance from the District Attorney’s Office that she will be safe, that her son will still face trial or, perhaps better, accept a decent plea agreement or be committed to a mental health institution for a very long time.
“He’ll be back looking for me,” she said. “Then he’ll kill me.”
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Martin was the youngest of her four children, the only child born during a second brief, turbulent marriage. That, she said, may be at the center of her son’s struggles.
“There was a lot of anger there,” she said. “Martin’s father used to tell him I didn’t love him as much as my other kids. But I did.”
At age 12, she said, he started smoking marijuana and dabbling in other drugs. He got into fights at school. He started stealing. He was in and out of juvenile detention centers, in and out of residential treatment centers she could get him into.
“I did what I could to help him,” she said.
At 19, he moved to California to be closer to his father. It was during that time that she learned he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
About six years later, she returned home one night to find him sitting on her porch. He lived with her for two months, and then she found him another place to live. “He was acting so weird,” she said. Things grew weirder. In August 2012, Montaño was arrested on battery, false imprisonment and other charges after he was accused of pushing Porras to the ground and barring her from the door as he shouted “You have demons in you!”
He was out on bail in June 2013, according to court documents, when Porras took him to lunch and then to Wal-Mart. It’s the last memory she has of him. “He seemed real nervous, like he was up to something,” she recalled. “Something was off.” She apparently was right. Previous Journal articles describe what happened that next morning:
Montaño told Albuquerque police detectives that he had heard voices coming from his television, telling him to go to his mother’s house in the Northeast Heights to “get the clones out.”
His mother’s tenant, outside with his dog, was attacked first, stabbed in the back and slammed in the face with rocks.
Porras was next. She was beaten, stabbed, choked, her neck slashed with a knife. Montaño complained later that her skin was too tough to slice deep enough.
A neighbor saw Montaño stuffing her and the tenant into the trunk of her car.
Later, another witness saw Montaño throw his mother into the Rio Grande from the Central Avenue bridge. Montaño fled before he could toss the tenant into the river as well, leaving the bleeding man on the bridge.
He was later arrested and charged with 15 felonies, including kidnapping and attempted murder. He remains in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
In January 2016, he pleaded no contest to the earlier attack against his mother and was sentenced to 1½ years. But the more serious, 2013 case continues to languish because the issue of his competency to stand trial has repeatedly stayed the case. That, Porras said, worries her. “I’m afraid they’re just going to let him out,” she said.
But Adolfo Mendez, spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office, said her son isn’t expected to be released anytime soon. The case has been complicated, he said, because of the competency issue, but a resolution is expected in a matter of months.
He declined to offer further details in the case, such as whether a plea agreement or insanity defense is being considered. He pointed out that if convicted of all charges, Montaño, now 29, faces up to 90 years in prison, 105 years with habitual offender enhancements.
“A kidnapping charge alone is 18 years,” he said.
All of which is comforting to Porras as much as anything can be.
Since the attack, she’s moved to an undisclosed location, put bars on the windows, changed her phone number to unlisted. She struggles still with the damage done to her throat and the short-term memory loss caused by a stroke brought on by the head trauma.
“It’s really a wonder I am still alive,” she said.
What hurts the most is knowing that the man accused of hurting her is her own son.
She thinks about what she might say to him if she ever sees him again.
“You threw me in the river like a piece of garbage,” she said, her voice anguished more than angry. “Why did you do this to your mother? How dare you? I was good to you. I loved you.”
It’s a conversation she’d just as soon forget.