More details emerge in downtown rape case

Santa Fe police released more details Friday about a woman’s report that she was raped by an unknown man she encountered earlier this week outside a downtown hotel while she waited for a ride home.

The woman told Officer Amanda Esquibel during an interview at her home Tuesday night that she had left the bar inside the Hotel Chimayó de Santa Fe around 1:30 a.m. that morning and was waiting for an Uber driver on Washington Avenue, according to a report. She had too much to drink at the bar, the woman said, and had been cut off by a bartender.

Before her driver arrived, she said, a man approached her, smiling and saying, “Come on let’s go.” She initially told him no, the report says, but then she decided to go with the man, who led her to an alley between the Hotel Chimayó and the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi.

He shoved her against a wall, the report says, and raped her in the alley. The report provides no identifying details of the man. “There is no suspect information at this time,” it says.

Deputy police Chief Andrew Padilla, asked to explain why the report didn’t describe the suspect, said he wasn’t certain why the officer didn’t include identifying information.

Esquibel’s report says the 44-year-old woman, originally reported to be 43, was highly intoxicated during the interview. Her shoulders were sore from being pushed against the wall, the woman told the officer, and she “kept saying that it was her fault and that she should have fought back. I explained to her it was not her fault,” Esquibel wrote.

According to the report, the woman told her roommate about the assault. She told him “she was raped last night and was trying to get over it,” and the roommate called police to report the crime.

Esquibel tried to persuade the woman to go to the hospital for an examination, the report says, but the woman declined, saying she had taken two showers since the incident and didn’t believe an exam would yield any evidence.

The officer said she told the woman “that there would still be enough evidence if she went now,” and that nurses would do their best to make her feel comfortable.

The woman’s roommate had collected the clothes she had worn at the time of the incident and placed them in a bag, and the woman agreed to let the officer take them and have them tested for any possible DNA evidence from the suspect.

Esquibel wrote in her report that she interviewed staff at both hotels, including a security officer at the Hotel Chimayó, who said he didn’t see or hear the incident. She also said she was working to obtain surveillance camera footage from the hotels. Staff at the Hotel Chimayó said they only have cameras inside the hotel and bar not in the alley.