State v. Sanchez, A-1-CA-35413
| Decision Date | 21 February 2019 |
| Docket Number | No. A-1-CA-35413,A-1-CA-35413 |
| Parties | STATE OF NEW MEXICO, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. JEREMY LUKAS SANCHEZ, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | Court of Appeals of New Mexico |
This memorandum opinion was not selected for publication in the New Mexico Appellate Reports. Please see Rule 12-405 NMRA for restrictions on the citation of unpublished memorandum opinions. Please also note that this electronic memorandum opinion may contain computer-generated errors or other deviations from the official paper version filed by the Court of Appeals and does not include the filing date.
APPEAL FROM THE DISTRICT COURT OF DOÑA ANA COUNTY
Hector H. Balderas, Attorney General
Santa Fe, NM
Walter M. Hart III, Assistant Attorney General
for Appellee
Bennett J. Baur, Chief Public Defender
Nina Lalevic, Assistant Appellate Defender
Santa Fe, NM
for Appellant
{1} Defendant Jeremy Lukas Sanchez was convicted of aggravated assault upon a peace officer, arson, and criminal damage to property. Defendant appeals his convictions, raising the following issues: sufficiency of the evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel, improper jury instruction, and double jeopardy. We affirm.
{2} This case arises from an incident at a motel in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The motel's clerks called into dispatch after Defendant repeatedly pressed a panic button in his motel room. As Officer Peter Bradley arrived on the scene, he was notified by dispatch that Defendant was calling 911 but would hang up without speaking. Officer Bradley was in his fully-marked police vehicle, wearing his full uniform with a cloth badge attached with Velcro onto the uniform. Officer Bradley went to Defendant's room, which was located on the ground floor; the motel room door opened directly into the parking lot and there were two windows located near the door. After the officer knocked on the door, Defendant asked who was there. The officer identified himself, informed Defendant he was with the police department, and explained he was "there to make sure everybody was okay." Officer Bradley asked Defendant to open the door, but Defendant did not respond.
{3} After receiving no response from Defendant, Officer Bradley continued knocking on the door. Officer Bradley eventually heard some muffled yelling, followed by "what sounded like . . . some sort of metal striking the floor." The officer continued knocking on the door and announcing "police department," but Defendant did not respond. Another officer, Officer Bobby Jaramillo, arrived onthe scene, also wearing his uniform and badge. Officer Bradley asked Officer Jaramillo to retrieve the key to Defendant's room. Officer Bradley "continued knocking on the door and announcing "police department," to which Defendant would yell, In response, Officer Bradley removed his badge and held it up to the peephole, explaining that he was a police officer and that Defendant could look through the peephole to see the badge. The officer then heard movements toward the door, but did not know if Defendant looked through the peephole.
{4} Once Officer Jaramillo returned with an electronic key to Defendant's room, the officers used the key and attempted to open the door, but the door was dead-bolted shut. Officer Bradley again knocked on the door, announced "police department," and tried opening the door with the electronic key, but was unsuccessful. The officers continued knocking on the door and announcing "police department," but Defendant repeatedly stated, "I don't believe you." The motel clerk provided the officers with a "hard key" to open the dead bolt, but the door would still not open. As a result, the officers requested that additional officers bring a battering ram and a ballistic shield. The officers also requested assistance from the fire department.
{5} Approximately forty-five minutes later, officers brought a ballistic shield and battering ram, which Officers Edward Villareal and Jonathan Boehne, bothwearing their uniforms and badges, used. Officer Boehne struck the door with the battering ram, eventually opening it. As soon as the door opened, it "bounced right back at him," which the officers believed to be caused by something barricading the door or someone standing on the other side of the door. Officer Bradley then kicked the door, but it again bounced back. Officer Boehne then broke the windows located near the door, at which point an officer pulled the drawn curtains and Officer Jaramillo observed Defendant pressing against the door with his left shoulder, clenching his left hand, and holding a large, military-style knife in his right hand.
{6} Upon seeing Defendant holding the knife, Officer Jaramillo yelled "knife" to warn the other officers. At the same time, Officer Bradley "threw [his] shoulder into" the door, finally opening it. The door to Defendant's room opened into the bedroom area, which connected to a bathroom through a small hallway in the far-right corner of the room. As Officer Bradley pushed the door open, Defendant was standing six to eight feet away, in the center of the room, facing Officer Bradley, and "tightly" holding the knife in his right hand at a ninety-degree angle away from his body. Defendant was leaning slightly forward, standing with his shoulders rolled forward, his "arms coming to the center line," and his feet at a wide stance. Officers Bradley and Villareal described Defendant's posture as "aggressive" and a "fighter's stance." Officer Bradley testified that he "was actually very afraid that[Defendant] was going to rush at [him] with the knife." Officer Villareal testified that he thought Defendant could have taken "some sort of lethal action, some deadly force." Defendant began "screaming" at the officers, exclaiming, "You're not the police." The officers repeatedly told Defendant to drop the knife, but Defendant responded by yelling that they were not police officers.
{7} As Officer Bradley was raising his rifle to defend himself, another officer fired a foam projectile at Defendant, causing Defendant to drop the knife. Defendant then turned his body, grabbed the knife, and ran into the bathroom. After the officers yelled at Defendant to come out of the bathroom, they heard "a lot of banging" in the bathroom. Defendant threw the bathroom mirror into the small hallway, causing the mirror to break into jagged pieces of glass, and poured what appeared to be shampoo or body wash onto the broken glass. Officer Bradley testified that this conduct was consistent with an attempt to make the glass "extremely sharp" and "slick," which is "a very common plan that's used by individuals who are attempting to limit the ingress of officers or correction officers into any kind of an area." Defendant then "screamed out at [the officers] that he was going to die and he was going to take one of [them] with him and for [the officers] to come and get him." The officers did not go into the bathroom because they feared that doing so would result in injury either to an officer or to Defendant.
{8} While Defendant was in the bathroom, he created a hole in the wall between the bathroom and bedroom. Through the hole, the officers saw an orange flicker, followed by a flame. Using fire extinguishers, the officers sprayed into the hole and put out the fire. Despite the officers' instructions, Defendant did not leave the bathroom. Instead, Defendant asked the officers to hear their radios, at which point some of the officers turned up their radios as loud as possible. Dispatch then conducted a "welfare check" on the officers, with each officer responding, through their radios. Officer Bradley showed Defendant his badge, and another officer threw a large patch on the back of his vest that said "Police" into the bathroom.
{9} During this exchange, however, Defendant stated that he did not believe the police officers were police officers. As the officers continued to instruct Defendant to leave the bathroom, Defendant used either the broken mirror's metal lining or a towel rod to pull clothing and other objects into the bathroom to use as fuel for another fire. Because the officers were unable to put out this fire with the fire extinguisher, the fire department came and used a hose to put out the fire. While the fire department was using the hose, they accidentally sprayed a table, sending it toward Defendant. Defendant grabbed the table, disassembled it, and used it as a tool in an attempt to break through the wall into an adjacent room.
{10} After speaking with a hostage negotiation team, Defendant emerged from the bathroom and was taken into custody. Upon reviewing the damage, the hotelmanager observed that, in addition to the damage described above, Defendant removed a toilet embedded in the bathroom wall, which resulted in flooding and water damage in a nearby room, and pulled out a light fixture located inside his room's shower. While speaking with an investigator for the Las Cruces Fire Department after the investigator "wrapped up the scene," Defendant stated, "[H]e had started the fire because he wanted to get the officers out of the room[.]"
{11} Defendant was charged with aggravated assault upon a peace officer, arson, and criminal damage to property. Following a jury trial, Defendant was convicted on all counts. Defendant appeals his convictions.
{12} Defendant first argues that his conviction for aggravated assault upon a peace officer was not supported by sufficient evidence. "In reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence, we must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the guilty verdict, indulging all reasonable inferences and resolving all conflicts in the evidence in favor of the verdict." State v. Holt, 2016-NMSC-011, ¶ 20, 368 P.3d 409 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). "In that light, the Court determines...
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