Background
On the night of October 18, 2019, Cayla Campos and her boyfriend Sidney Toler were playing Pokémon Go near Bianchetti Park in Albuquerque when they stumbled upon an armed robbery in progress. Defendant Izaiah Garcia and his associate Gabriel Marquez had driven to the area after Garcia’s girlfriend reported concern about individuals gathered near her home, including a vehicle associated with Christian Mattock, a young man against whom Garcia harbored a violent grudge. Garcia and Marquez, armed with an AR-15, robbed the occupants of a parked car. When Cayla attempted to drive away, Garcia pursued her vehicle, struck it repeatedly with the gun barrel, and fired four to six rounds at the fleeing car. A bullet struck Cayla in the neck, killing her; her car eventually crashed through the front wall of a nearby home where a mother and three children resided. Garcia believed Christian Mattock was in the vehicle.
Prosecutors introduced evidence that just weeks earlier, in September 2019, Garcia had attempted to shoot Christian at a party, missing him and instead killing a bystander named Sean Markey. At trial, Marquez testified under a plea agreement that Garcia was the shooter in the Cayla Campos killing and described Garcia’s vendetta against Christian. Two additional witnesses, Tanner White and Zeke Fox, corroborated the existence of that grudge and Garcia’s role in the September shooting. Physical evidence, including DNA from an ammunition box matching the caliber of casings recovered at the scene, also linked Garcia to the crime. The jury convicted Garcia of first-degree deliberate intent murder, first-degree depraved mind murder, shooting at or from a motor vehicle, armed robbery, aggravated assault, tampering with evidence, child abuse, and conspiracy. To avoid a double jeopardy violation, the district court vacated the deliberate intent murder conviction and sentenced Garcia to life in prison.
Garcia appealed on three grounds: (1) insufficient evidence to support the depraved mind murder and aggravated assault convictions; (2) the trial court’s denial of his motion for a change of venue based on pretrial media coverage; and (3) the trial court’s admission of evidence concerning his prior September 2019 shooting at Christian.
The Court’s Holding
The New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed all convictions and the life sentence. On sufficiency of the evidence, the Court held that sufficient evidence supported the depraved mind murder conviction. Garcia’s firing of an AR-15 at a moving vehicle in a densely residential neighborhood—where homes encircled the park and innocent bystanders were foreseeably at risk—was sufficient for a jury to find that Garcia knew his actions were greatly dangerous to the lives of more than one person. Evidence of Garcia’s vendetta against Christian, including his prior attempt to kill him, supported the inference of intensified malice or evil intent. The Court declined to review the aggravated assault sufficiency challenge because Garcia’s briefing on that issue was wholly undeveloped and unsupported by any citation to authority.
On the venue change, the Court held the trial court did not abuse its broad discretion. The voir dire process—supplemented by additional questionnaires and a larger jury pool—revealed that only four venire members had any prior awareness of the case, none of whom sat on the petit jury. The complete absence of actual prejudice among seated jurors foreclosed Garcia’s claim, and the Court declined to modify its presumed-prejudice framework based on Garcia’s undeveloped argument about social media’s role in news consumption.
On the prior-acts evidence, the Court held the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting testimony and surveillance video of Garcia’s September 2019 attempt to kill Christian under Rule 11-404(B). The evidence was admissible to show intent, motive, opportunity, and identity—not mere propensity. The Court also rejected Garcia’s Rule 11-403 unfair prejudice argument, finding the prior shooting’s probative value on identity and intent substantially outweighed any prejudicial effect, particularly given the trial court’s limiting measure of excising the portion of the surveillance video showing Sean Markey being shot. The Court further held that showing the video four times at trial was not impermissibly cumulative where each viewing served a distinct testimonial purpose.
Key Takeaways
- Under New Mexico’s depraved mind murder statute, a defendant need not actually know the specific number of people endangered; subjective knowledge of a very high degree of risk is sufficient, and firing multiple rounds from a semi-automatic rifle into a moving car in a dense residential neighborhood supplies that knowledge.
- Co-conspirator testimony, even from a witness who received a favorable plea deal, carries no special suspicion requirement under New Mexico law and is evaluated solely through ordinary credibility determinations by the jury.
- Prior-act evidence of a defendant’s earlier attempt to kill the same intended target is admissible under Rule 11-404(B) to prove intent, motive, and identity in a subsequent killing, even where the victim is an unintended bystander, provided the trial court takes appropriate measures to sanitize gratuitously inflammatory content.
- A defendant’s undeveloped appellate argument—consisting of a single heading with no citation to authority—will not be reviewed by the New Mexico Supreme Court.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the breadth of New Mexico’s depraved mind murder doctrine in drive-by and pursuit shooting scenarios. By clarifying that a defendant’s subjective knowledge of danger extends to foreseeable third parties in the surrounding environment—not merely occupants of the targeted vehicle—the Court signals that perpetrators who open fire in residential areas face first-degree murder exposure even when they claim to have targeted only a single person. Defense counsel in similar cases will need to address the entire geographic and populated context of a shooting, not just the defendant’s subjective beliefs about who was in a specific vehicle.
The decision also offers practical guidance on two recurring trial issues. On venue, it confirms that a robust voir dire process with supplemental screening measures can defeat even a well-documented pretrial publicity claim, and it declines to expand the presumed-prejudice doctrine to account for social media saturation without a developed factual and legal argument from the moving party. On prior-act evidence, the opinion illustrates how prosecutors can use evidence of a prior attempt on the same target to corroborate a co-conspirator’s account and shore up the identity element—a recurring challenge in cases that turn on the credibility of accomplice witnesses.