Former Mr. New Mexico found guilty of murder
TAOS — A Taos County jury found Micola “Mick” Sopyn, a former bodybuilder once crowned Mr. New Mexico, guilty of seconddegree murder Friday in the shooting death of 38-year-old Amber Hava.
In delivering the decision in the 8th Judicial District Court, the 12-member jury also found Sopyn guilty of using a firearm to commit the crime.
The jury found Sopyn not guilty of a charge of tampering with evidence.
Sopyn faces up to 15 years in prison and $12,500 in fines on the murder charge. It took the jury approximately three hours to return with the verdict on the fifth day of the trial.
The case stems from an incident in July 2014, when Taos County sheriff ’s deputies were dispatched to Sopyn’s home in Taos, where they found Hava lying on her back outside the residence with an open wound on the left side of her chest. Hava was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Taos News reports.
Sopyn, who did not testify during the trial, said during the investigation that he accidentally shot Hava with a Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun after an argument over drug money. Sopyn said Hava was visiting his home with Gary Medina. Neither of the two were welcome at his home, Sopyn told police.
The prosecution called the relationship among Sopyn, Medina and Hava “a weird triangulation.” Medina, a witness in the case, provided some inconsistent statements — a key part of the defense’s argument.
Sopyn claimed he had retrieved the shotgun from his bedroom, loaded it “and was planning on shooting a couple rounds into the air to scare them so they would leave.” He alleged his finger was on the trigger and the shotgun discharged into Hava as she was reaching for the weapon, according to a sheriff ’s deputy in a 2014 written statement. A grand jury indicted Sopyn in September 2014.
The trial began Monday. Attorneys delivered their closing arguments, with the state prosecutor arguing that Sopyn fully understood his actions could cause Hava great bodily harm and that any reasonable person would have cooled off after the altercation — rather than fetching a firearm.
Defense attorneys implored the jury to not let the state get away with what they called a “shoddy” investigation.
This story first appeared on the website of The Taos News ,a sister publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican.