Sheriff: Suspect shot after assaulting deputies
Driver allegedly tried to ram lawmen’s vehicles after chase
Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales said Friday that deputies had stopped a suspect’s truck earlier this week but it was reversing into a sergeant’s vehicle, spinning its tires and pouring smoke into the air when a sergeant fired multiple times, wounding the man.
Adrian Chacon, 28, was injured and was in stable condition at a hospital after he was shot Tuesday morning by sheriff’s Sgt. Christopher Starr, who has been with the department for nearly 17 years and hasn’t been involved in a shooting before.
Chacon will be booked on two counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer and other charges, Gonzales said.
The sheriff called a news conference Friday to provide more detail about the latest shooting by deputies, which happened in the Valley Gardens Park after a chase that included Chacon driving across two properties after crashing through fences in a stolen Ford F-150.
The chase started after deputies were called to Central New Mexico Community College’s South Valley campus on reports that Chacon appeared intoxicated and was yelling in his truck, which had been reported stolen. When deputies arrived, he appeared to be passed out, Gonzales said.
After positioning their patrol cars around Chacon’s vehicle, deputies approached, but Chacon apparently woke up and rammed into a deputy’s vehicle while trying to escape.
“The deputies had to get out of the way in order to avoid being harmed,” Gonzales said.
Deputies gave chase and eventually used a pursuit intervention maneuver to end the chase and pinned Chacon’s vehicle between a concrete wall and a utility pole near the 4500 block of Valley Park Drive SW, Gonzales said.
Starr fired his gun after Chacon started reversing into a marked unit. Details of what transpired are still being investigated, and deputies don’t use cameras, so there’s no video of how events unfolded. But Sgt. John Allen said deputies were in “close proximity” to the aggressive vehicle and that it was “very dangerous for deputies.”
Last year, BCSO deputies were involved in nine shootings in 4½ months, and the shootings have led to several lawsuits that have raised questions about the agencies use-of-force, pursuit and other policies.
Albuquerque police in recent years have revamped their policies in an effort to curb excessive force cases. One of their policy changes has been to severely restrict officers from firing into moving vehicles unless a person inside is using a firearm.
“When you look at the factors in any type of deputy-involved shooting, especially with a vehicle, ‘Are they a danger to the public? Are they a danger to … the police officer? Do we need to incapacitate to stop the action so he doesn’t hurt the public?’ ” Allen said at the news conference. If “he already did an aggravated assault against a police (officer) and he’s going to hurt the public further, we need to stop him.”