Suspect in theft, stabbing sought in robbery
Culley, who failed to appear in court in store incident, a suspect in home invasion, beating
An 18-year-old charged with stabbing a Santa Fe Plaza store employee during an October shoplifting incident is now being sought in connection with a brutal robbery that police say he committed after he was released on bond.
According to an affidavit for his arrest, Mathew Culley and two other men are suspected of beating an acquaintance of Culley’s and stealing items from the older man’s northwest-side apartment.
The victim told police that he and Culley had been romantically involved and that Culley lived with him briefly a few months before the incident, and went by the name Treyvon Miller.
The victim told police that he was watching television on Nov. 4 when Culley came to the door with two other men. According to the affidavit, the victim initially told the men they couldn’t enter, then agreed to let one of Culley’s companions use the bathroom.
That’s when he heard a gun being cocked, he told police.
The victim told police that he was forced to his knees and held down by one of Culley’s companions while Culley punched him in the face and hit him over the head with a glass table top so hard that it broke. The men punched and “stomped on” the victim, the affidavit said, and one of them stuck the barrel of a gun in his face and told him that he was going to kill him.
The attackers then dragged the victim to the bathroom, tied him up and pistol-whipped him repeatedly, he told police. They then left, taking the victim’s MacBook Air laptop computer and his iPhone 7.
Police arrived shortly afterward, according to the affidavit, alerted by a distress call the victim managed to send from a Life-Alert emergency response button as the men entered the apartment.
Reached by The New Mexican on Monday, the victim said that he suffered a broken nose and another broken bone under his left eye. He estimated his computer and cellphone were worth roughly $3,400.
While investigating the case, the affidavit said, police discovered that the man known to the victim as “Treyvon Miller” was Mathew Culley, who last month was charged with shoplifting items from the downtown Five & Dime
and then using a pocketknife to stab an employee who chased him.
Culley was charged with felony aggravated battery, tampering with evidence and shoplifting in connection with the October incident, and released on an unsecured appearance bond pending a November hearing. Court records indicate he never showed up for that preliminary hearing and a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest on Nov. 2.
The robbery for which Culley is wanted happened two days later.
Culley — who also goes by the aliases Mathew Cullry, Treyvon Miller and Treyvon Tibbs, according to the affidavit — faces seven felony charges including kidnapping, armed robbery and aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon, as well as a misdemeanor charge of criminal damage to property.