Young witnesses to White shooting detail chaos
Several people recount alcohol use, fighting, suspect’s actions
Head nods, one-word answers and slang peppered the testimony of witnesses who took the stand Thursday in the first-degree murder trial of Estevan Montoya, accused of fatally shooting high school basketball star Fedonta “JB” White in the summer of 2020.
State District Judge T. Glenn Ellington kept having to remind the young witnesses to give clearly spoken answers as they recounted what happened at a Chupadero house party at which Montoya, then 16, is accused of shooting White, 18, in front of dozens of onlookers.
The youthful witnesses who took the stand Thursday were at times recalcitrant, but several gave moving accounts and even physical demonstrations of what they observed at the party — which reportedly had started out as a small affair but grew to more than
100 attendees by the time the shooting occurred in the early hours of Aug. 1, 2020.
Two witnesses showed jurors how the boys had taken up fighting stances against one another before Montoya reached into his waistband, drew a handgun and fired a single bullet which entered White’s upper right chest and lodged in his spine.
One girl wept as she recalled tending to White — a high school basketball player she knew only in passing — after he’d been shot by Montoya, a boy from her Spanish class.
“I was trying to tell people to take a step back, to give him space,” she said. “I was asking people ‘If you believe in God just pray for him,’ and I was stroking his cheek because I figured he was probably afraid.”
Attorneys for the prosecution and defense tried to draw out answers
to back up their respective theories of Montoya’s actions — as either murder or self-defense — by pressing the witnesses to describe the nuances of what they’d seen in sometimes tense exchanges.
Under direct examination by the state, witness Alexandra Estrada said she’d seen White and Montoya have a friendly exchange earlier in the evening, and later witnessed White step down off the porch and swing at Montoya, who dodged the punch.
After that, she said: “I saw Estevan running away and then he turned around and pulled and the gun and he shot him, and then he jumped the fence and ran away.” Her statement closely tracked what has been the version of events presented by Montoya’s defense attorney Dan Marlowe.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Ben Ortega, Estrada was reluctant to use the word “running.”
“It was like a jog,” she said. “Speed walking, it wasn’t running.
“I don’t want to say running; it was more like getting some distance,” she repeated when pressed, prompting Ortega to draw her attention to a transcript of her 2021 pretrial interview, in which she’d said answered “yes” to a question about whether she’d seen Montoya running away from White.
Witnesses Aaliyah Trujillo also testified she’d seen White throw the first punch, but said both boys had swung and missed. She added she saw White landing a punch on Montoya’s back and Montoya delivering a glancing blow to White.
Trujillo said she’d drunk about 10 shots of alcohol before the shooting.
Angel Gonzales Kingsbury testified the fight happened “at the point in the party where everyone was throwing up.”
“It was gross,” she added. “I was ready to leave.”
Both boys were acting as if they wanted to fight, she said, and left the witness stand to mimic their postures — feet planted and spread, with fists up.
She momentarily turned her attention to another scuffle — one of three she said broke out that night — and didn’t see a chase or an exchange of punches.
Less than a minute later, she said, she heard the gunshot.
“I had never heard a gunshot,” she said. “But it sounded like a ballon popping and there were no balloons, so I put two and two together.”
When she turned around, Gonzales Kingsbury said, White was laying on the ground and Montoya standing there “looking towards us.”
Their eyes met.
“After I looked at him, he hopped the fence and ran,” she said.
Investigators in the case never recovered the gun used to shoot White, but prosecutor Jennifer Padgett Macias told jurors earlier this week the state does have evidence linking Montoya to a weapon like the one that fired the bullet that killed White, which will be presented before the trial is set to end May 18.
White was a rising basketball star who had planned to leave Santa Fe High a year early to play for the University of New Mexico men’s basketball team. He was one of the most highly recruited athletes in recent Santa Fe history.
Despite White’s popularity as a star athlete and Montoya’s reputation as a member of a group of troublemakers called the South Side Goons, Macias told jurors earlier this week “not a lot separated” the two boys — noting they were only two years apart and had both had been raised by their grandmothers.