Ex-inmate who won lawsuit for dig at state prison arrested
Chavez jailed in Las Cruces home invasion
A former New Mexico penitentiary inmate who made headlines for waging legal battles with the state Department of Corrections during and after his 23-year-prison term for second-degree murder is back behind bars.
The Doña Ana County Sheriff ’s office arrested Samuel P. Chavez, 58, over the weekend and accused him of donning a wig and fake beard, arming himself with a handgun and invading the home of a Las Cruces family.
Chavez, a Las Cruces resident, had been released from prison in 2012 after serving time for fatally shooting a friend in 1988. He gain notoriety for claiming in a 2007 lawsuit, which was settled this year, that prison officials had poisoned inmates’ food and water and sold their organs and blood on the black market.
After Chavez was released in 2012, he won a two-year court battle for permission to dig in and around the old main prison outside Santa Fe to search for ledgers and sealed jars of tainted food he said he had hidden at the now-defunct prison and which he said would prove his claims. However, he came up empty.
In his latest arrest, the sheriff ’s office said Monday that Chavez was wearing a bulletproof vest and an earpiece “connected to a police scanner” during the home invasion.
A statement by the sheriff ’s office said Chavez approached a 67-year-old man who was sitting on a porch, pointed a handgun at him and threatened to kill the man if he didn’t give him money around 11 a.m. Friday.
Chavez then forced the man inside, bound his hands with zip-ties and duct tape and took $432 from the man’s pocket, sheriff ’s spokeswoman Kelly Jameson said.
Chavez then hit the man’s grandson in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious, and bound his hands
and feet before going to another home on the property where he encountered the grandson’s 23-year-old girlfriend and also demanded money while forcing her hands behind her back so he could tie her up.
Meanwhile, the sheriff ’s office says, the grandson was able to break free and run to a neighbor’s house to call 911.
Deputies were only about three minutes away, officials said, and two officers approached the house on foot and encountered Chavez. They commanded him to stop and drop his gun, the statement says, but Chavez ran out the front gate and was hit by a patrol car of another officer who was responding to the scene, authorities said.
Chavez was treated for minor injuries and kept overnight at a Las Cruces hospital before he was jailed on charges of kidnapping, robbery, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, aggravated burglary, possession of burglary tools, resisting or obstructing an officer and attempting to commit a felony.
The three victims were not injured, Jameson said.
Chavez is being held without bond, the spokeswoman said.
The criminal case is just his latest entanglement with the criminal justice system.
While serving his murder sentence, Chavez was a known “jailhouse lawyer” who helped other prisoners with legal filings and was a prisoner representative during the implementation of the Duran Decree, a court order that was put in place to govern prison conditions after the 1980 prison riot that left 33 inmates dead.
In 2004, after Chavez filed a complaint about being kept in solitary confinement for years, a judge ordered the Corrections Department to stop holding him in segregation.
“Chavez has continually been in administrative custody for over 7 years,” the order said, adding that not a single Corrections Department official was able to explain why Chavez continued to be held in segregation.
In 2007, Chavez filed a civil complaint against former Gov. Bill Richardson, the Department of Corrections and various Corrections officials claiming he suffered years of abuse, torture and retaliation from prison staff because of his advocacy on behalf of himself and other prisoners.
The case was still pending when he got permission to dig inside the former main prison in August 2016 for up to an hour.
Chavez had also been given permission to search for the items in a crawl space in the prison’s basement, but on the day he conducted the search, he found that the only door that could have led him there, a boiler room door, was welded shut.
“It’s all rigged,” Chavez told news reporters at the time. “If I could have gotten in there, inside, I know I would have gotten it out of there. I know exactly where it is.”
According to online court records, Chavez’ case against the Department of Corrections and officials who worked there during his incarceration was dismissed in January by agreement of both parties.
State General Services Department spokesman Wyndham Kemsley said Monday in response to a request for a copy of the agreement that he needed permission from general counsel to release it.
Chavez told The New Mexican in 2015 that he was writing a book about his prison experience, saying one of his objectives in filing his civil case against the Department of Corrections had been to make the public more aware of what goes on in New Mexico’s prisons.
The sheriff’s office says the grandson was able to break free and run to a neighbor’s house to call 911. Deputies were three minutes away.