By Joshua Bowling, Searchlight New Mexico
Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Española protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de Oñate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez’s violent outburst.
Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O’odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff’s office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff’s deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen “leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.”
The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county’s proposal to install a statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery.
Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez’s path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says.
“There were no sheriff’s deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,” the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip.
In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning.
“I would like to see the police do their job,” Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. “I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn’t even the sheriff’s office that apprehended the shooter—it was tribal police.”
Before the shooting, a warning
Courtesy of Rio Arriba County
Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield—who died in April of this year—emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate’s statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma.
Commissioners planned to install the statue—which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side—at a new location: the county complex in Española. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with “deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.”
“Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,” he wrote. “By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.”
Johns’ and Peixinho’s cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff’s deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as “darting back and forth” and “acting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.” “Due to Martinez’s disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,” the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff “then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.” Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene.
The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day’s potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot.
“They were deliberately indifferent,” Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe–based renewable-energy advocacy group.
If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd’s murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico.
In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages.
Courtesy of Rio Arriba County Commission
Alex Naranjo, the former chair of the Rio Arriba County Commission.
In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s—said the statue wouldn’t go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision.
None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho’s lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning.
A long road to recovery
Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez’s bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes—in his pancreas and liver—for six months.
Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it’s like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up—only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples.
“Every laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,” he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard “internal journey toward healing.”
Peixinho knows this journey well. She was just 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground and then looked up to see Martinez’s pistol aimed at her head.
For months after, she said, loud noises triggered her. If she was in a drive-thru, she would recline her car seat and lie down to make sure a stray bullet couldn’t find her. If she heard a gunshot outside her house, or a firework, or a car backfiring, the fear came back.
“There were times when I was at work and I’d hear a gunshot,” she recalled. “I’d crawl into the trunk of my car and I’d be stuck there for hours, so mortified.”
Both Johns and Peixinho said there’s little solace in the knowledge that the gunman was put away. At the last minute before trial, Martinez accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for four years. Prosecutors dropped a hate crime enhancement that they had previously sought.
Photo courtesy of Mariel Nanasi
Malaya Corrine Peixinho and Jacob Johns in Santa Fe.
“Every single time I look down, I have these massive scars and these big holes in me,” Johns said. “But it’s the psychological stuff that’s really been messing with me … I had to agree that my life was only worth four years.”
To both survivors, the outcome was a painful reminder of the violence facing Indigenous people. Just three years before Martinez shot Johns and leveled his gun at Peixinho, a man protesting an Oñate statue in Albuquerque was shot in the back four times by an assailant armed with a .40-caliber handgun.
Both Johns and Peixinho know that there’s no relitigating Martinez’s case. But they see their lawsuits as a step toward accountability.
“When law enforcement fails to do their job, it really puts society in danger,” Johns said. “We really have to have faith that we’re going to be protected when we’re exercising our constitutional rights.
