Trial underway for man charged in Fort Marcy machete attack
Defense: State missing evidence to prove Mescalaro man was masked assailant
Bryan “Spirit” Watchman held his intestines inside his body with one hand as he pounded on the door of a Santa Fe fire station after being stabbed in the stomach while sleeping in the bleachers at Fort Marcy Ballpark in 2017.
“I went to the front door … and tried to tuck my intestines under my shirt just to carry [them],” Watchman told jurors Tuesday. “I was knocking on the door for quite a while, then I started punching the door and ringing the doorbell.”
Watchman said an emergency phone outside the station was out of order and no one came to the door, so he crossed the bridge to Bishops Lodge Road, where he eventually knocked on the door of a home and asked for help from a couple who called 911.
“I wanted to survive,” he said.
Watchman was the first witness to testify in a jury trial for Wacey Raymond Chico, a 34-year-old Mescalero man charged with trying to kill Watchman as he slept.
Watchman said he was homeless at the time and had bedded down for the night on the top tier of bleachers in the ballpark.
It was a cold night, Watchman said, and he was inside his sleeping bag with several blankets pulled over his head when he awoke around 1:30 a.m. to hear someone calling his name and saying, “I have bad news for you. You are going to die tonight.”
Watchman said he poked his head out of the blankets and saw a “sword-looking thing” dangling from what appeared to be a man’s hand.
“I was caught o≠ guard,” Watchman said. “I didn’t have much time to think. I felt like someone punched me in the stomach, then I got punched again. With all those blankets on me, it just felt like someone was hitting me with a stick.”
Watchman, who said he didn’t know Chico, told jurors he tackled his assailant, who wore a mask over his face.
“We fell down and … just struggled all the way down,” Watchman said, indicating he and his attacker tumbled down about five rows of bleachers.
Near the bottom, Watchman said, the man kicked him in the groin and tried to choke him while telling him to just give up and die.
He didn’t know he’d been stabbed, Watchman said, until he felt burning and pressure in his stomach and became woozy.
Watchman tried to run away. And as he was fumbling with the latch on a gate that led to the baseball diamond, he looked up and saw the man was holding a machete in one hand and a switchblade knife in another.
Watchman said he tackled the man again and the man stabbed him in the head with the other knife. But he was able to break free and “just gazelled my way up the steps and ran fast.”
Watchman, who was barefoot, said he was afraid that if he ran, he’d fall. So he began walking to a nearby fire station, trying to hold his wound.
“I lifted my shirt and my intestines fell out,” he said. “It was pretty intense. Every time I took a breath, more of my intestine came out.”
Watchman said he was unable to rouse anyone at Fire Station 1 on Murales Road next to the park.
“So I got as much blood as I could and painted all over their door. … I did finger painting with my blood. … I wrote ‘Spirit.’ … I just put my blood everywhere so they knew I was there and they weren’t there for me,” he said.
Then he began walking along Bishops Lodge Road looking for a home where he might get help.
Watchman said most of the homes he walked past were gated, and he didn’t have the energy to scale a wall. But he eventually knocked on the door of a house that was being rented out on Airbnb, and the couple inside called 911 and told him to hang tight until help arrived.
Prosecutor Mary Carmack-Altwies said police found Watchman bleeding in the home’s driveway. Investigators had no leads in the case until about a month later, when a third man contacted police saying he had a story to tell.
After stabbing Watchman — for some imagined slight — Chico went to Taos with another man and a woman, Carmack-Altwies told jurors. One night while drinking hard liquor, he confessed to the other man that he had tried to kill Watchman.
The witness knew Watchman and tried to get away from Chico that night. But Chico pulled out his machete and knife and tried to attack the witness. The man threw dirt in Chico’s eyes and ran to a nearby hotel, where he called police, the prosecutor said.
But, she said, Taos police didn’t believe the man, so he hitchhiked to Santa Fe to report what he knew.
Chico’s defense attorney, Michael Jones, said investigators had no physical evidence connecting his client to the scene.
“This was a masked assailant. That’s the key here,” Jones said. “Nobody knows who this is.”
Jones also said the Santa Fe Police Department — which has come under fire for mishandling evidence — lost critical evidence in the case, including the shirt Watchman was wearing that night.
He said police found a machete and two masks in one of three backpacks recovered from the ballpark, but they have not identified whom they belong to. They also found DNA evidence at the scene that didn’t match Chico’s.
“We are now in the 20th century,” Jones said. “This isn’t the 16th century when we should only rely on the statement of witnesses like we did during the Salem witch trials . ... And at the end of this, you are going to find that the state is not going to be able to prove Mr. Chico did this.”
The trial is set to continue Friday and conclude Monday. If convicted of attempted murder and tampering with evidence, Chico faces up to 27 years in prison.
This was a masked assailant. That’s the key here. Nobody knows who this is.” Defense attorney Michael Jones