Man accused of shooting boy, 8, claims self-defense
Archuleta says someone fired at him first; assistant DA says evidence lacking
Aaron Archuleta was only defending himself and his passengers from someone who had shot at his vehicle when he opened fire on an Española family in 2015, striking an 8-year-old boy in the shoulder, Archuleta’s attorney said in court Tuesday, the opening day of his trial.
The incident, in the parking lot of an Española apartment complex, began with a fight, Archuleta’s lawyer said: the man’s girlfriend and her sister versus several female members of another family. Archuleta at first remained in his car, said defense attorney Sheri Raphaelson during her opening statements in the state District Court in Santa Fe.
He only got out of the car and started firing his .45 — inadvertently sending a bullet through the boy’s shoulder — after a man at the scene shot at Archuleta’s vehicle with a rifle, Raphaelson said.
State prosecutors told a different story, saying the altercation — which involved multiple family members of two women who had dated the same man — had ended, and that Archuleta and company were driving away when he stopped his Lincoln Navigator and opened fire on the unarmed family.
No evidence was ever found, Assistant District Attorney Estevan Sanchez said, of anyone else firing any shots.
Archuleta, 29, is charged with child abuse and shooting at an occupied dwelling. If convicted on all the charges, he
faces up to 27 years in prison.
Attorneys on both sides told jurors that physical evidence presented during the trial will prove their version of the events.
Sanchez said jurors will view a video of the incident that was captured by a neighbor’s surveillance camera.
Raphaelson said they’ll hear an audio recording of a key witness admitting she originally lied to police about whether Dennis Garcia, the man Archuleta claims fired the first shot, was at the residence at the time of the incident.
The witness, Brianna Knight, who was 17 at the time and at the center of the dispute preceding the shooting, admitted under cross-examination Tuesday that she had lied to police when she told them Garcia, her mother’s boyfriend, wasn’t at the home. Garcia “had a warrant and he didn’t want to get in trouble,” Knight said.
Tracking the relationships between people involved in the fight — sparked by a brawl between Knight and her boyfriend’s exgirlfriend, who was the sister of Archuleta’s girlfriend — could prove confusing for jurors.
But, attorneys in the case said, that part of the story isn’t important.
“At the end of the day, the charges are only about what happened to [the boy] in this case,” Sanchez said in his opening statement. “We aren’t talking about this fight, the other people being shot at; we are talking about an 8-year-old who was hit with a bullet.”
“The questions you’ll have to answer at the end is whether Aaron had a right to shoot back in self-defense,” Raphaelson countered. “That’s what this whole trial is about.”
An officer with the Española Police Department testified Tuesday that he passed Archuleta on the road as he was leaving the scene of the shooting. Having heard an alert on his radio about the incident, the officer said, he turned around and activated his lights in an attempt to pull over Archuleta.
But Archuleta kept driving, and someone in the car threw two handguns out the window before the vehicle eventually stopped, the officer testified.
Those guns — a pink-and-black 9 mm and a .380 semi-automatic handgun — were later recovered from along the road, the officer said. A .22-caliber revolver was found in a rear seat pocket inside the Lincoln Navigator.
Archuleta’s is scheduled to last through Thursday, but District Court Judge T. Glenn Ellington said it was moving along faster than anticipated, and the jury could begin deliberating as early as Wednesday.