New Mexico high school student killed 3 women in 'random' shooting rampage, police say - By Susan Montoya Bryan, Morgan Lee and Rio Yamat, Associated Press
The gunman who killed three people and wounded six others as he fired randomly while roaming his northwestern New Mexico neighborhood was a local high school student and his victims include a 97-year-old woman and her daughter, police said Tuesday.
Investigators were still trying to determine a motive for the attack by Beau Wilson, 18, in the Farmington neighborhood where he lived. They say he opened fire Monday, killing Gwendolyn Schofield, her 73-year-old daughter, Melody Ivie, and 79-year-old Shirley Voita.
Witnesses and police say Wilson walked through the neighborhood a short drive from downtown Farmington spraying bullets until police arrived within minutes and fatally shot him. Two police officers were among the wounded.
"The amount of violence and brutality that these people faced is unconscionable to me," Deputy Police Chief Kyle Dowdy said. "I don't care what age you are, I don't care what else is going on in your life, to kill three innocent elderly women that were just absolutely in no position to defend themselves is always going to be a tragedy."
Deputy Police Chief Baric Crum said Wilson was indiscriminately shooting at vehicles, but that some rounds also hit homes.
Dowdy said investigators do not believe Wilson knew anyone he shot.
"We've discovered nothing that leads us to believe that the suspect knew" the victims, he said. "We're pretty confident in that this was completely random."
In November, after he turned 18, Wilson legally purchased at least one gun used Monday, police said. He carried three firearms in the attack, including an assault-style weapon.
Four officers fired a total of 16 rounds at Wilson, including one of the wounded officers, said San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari.
Mayor Nate Duckett said Tuesday that the Farmington officer and state police officer were treated for their wounds and released from a hospital.
Authorities began receiving reports of gunshots at 10:57 a.m. and the first officer arrived at 11:02 a.m., police Chief Steve Hebbe said Monday in a video statement. Three minutes later, the gunman had been killed.
Joseph Robledo, a 32-year-old tree trimmer, said he rushed home after learning that his wife, Jolene, and their year-old daughter had sought shelter in the laundry room when gunshots rang out. A bullet went through his daughter's window, without hitting anyone.
Jolene Robledo said they had just finished breakfast when she heard "pop, pop, pop, pop," which she first thought was a car backfiring. She said they were going to run out the back door until she heard a man curse right outside, so she quietly shut the door and hid with her daughter between the washing machine and dryer.
"I mean it was crazy. I called my husband and he could hear the gunshots over the phone," she said. "He was freaking out and I was like, 'don't hang up, don't hang up!'"
Joseph Robledo said he jumped a fence to get in through the back door. Out front, he found an older woman in the street who had been wounded while driving by. She appeared to have fallen out of her car, which kept rolling without her, he said.
"I went out to see because the lady was just lying in the road, and to figure just what the heck was going on," Robledo said. He and others began to administer first aid.
Neighbors directed a police officer toward the suspect.
"We were telling (the officer), 'He's down there.' … The cop just went straight into action," Robledo said.
Robledo's own family car was perforated with bullets.
"We've been doing yard work all last week. I just thank God that nobody was outside in front," he said. "Obviously, elderly people — he didn't have no sympathy for them."
Downtown Farmington, a short drive from the neighborhood, has undergone a transformation of sorts in recent years, with cafes and breweries cropping up alongside decades-old businesses that trade in Native American crafts from silver jewelry to wool weavings.
Nick Akins, a middle school teacher and resident, said it's a great place to live, with a mix of homes, short-term rental apartments and churches.
"You never think it's going to happen here, and all of a sudden, in a tiny little town, it comes here," Akins said.
On Tuesday, orange circles of spray paint still marked the ground where police had collected evidence. Authorities were using metal detectors to search the grass in front of one of the churches along the street where gunfire erupted.
As night approached Monday, dozens of people gathered at Hills Church, a few miles (kilometers) from the attack scene, to pray at the base of a tall metal cross. Lead pastor Matt Mizell talked about living in a "dark and broken world" but told the crowd there was still hope and asked God to provide them strength.
Politicians also weighed in about the attack.
Duckett said in a statement that the shooting "has left us reeling in anguish and disbelief."
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that she was praying for the families of those killed and that it "serves at yet another reminder of how gun violence destroys lives in our state and our country every single day."
New Mexico enacted a red-flag law in 2020 that can be used to seize guns from people who pose a danger to others or themselves. Dowdy said relatives expressed concern about Wilson's mental health when interviewed by police but that he didn't have enough information at this time to further elaborate.
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents the area in Congress, said in a Facebook post that "our beautiful Nuevo Mexico is not immune to the mass shootings that occur across the country — Every. Single. Day."
"I praise the heroes who drove to danger to stop the violence. I pray for the quick recovery of the wounded and for the families of those we lost," she said.
___
Lee reported from Santa Fe and Yamat reported from Las Vegas. Associated Press writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed.
A man fired randomly in a New Mexico neighborhood, killing 3. Police are trying to figure out why - By Susan Montoya Bryan, Ken Ritter And Morgan Lee Associated Press
The bullets that an 18-year-old man fired while meandering through a northwestern New Mexico neighborhood struck targets apparently picked at random, including cars, homes and passersby. Police responded to the scene within minutes and swiftly killed the gunman, but not before he killed three people and wounded several others.
Authorities on Tuesday were trying to determine what led to Monday's attack in Farmington, a city of about 50,000 that is a bedroom community for the oil and gas industry near the Four Corners, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet.
The attacker, whose name hadn't been released as of Tuesday morning, carried at least three weapons, including an AR-style rifle, according to police. Authorities also hadn't identified the dead or six wounded, including two police officers who were treated at a hospital. Police were expected to release further details about the case at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.
"At this point it appears to be purely random, that there was no schools, no churches and no individuals targeted," Police Chief Steve Hebbe said Monday night in a recorded video statement.
Hebbe said the "suspect randomly fired at whatever entered his head to shoot at," as bullets pierced a half-dozen houses and several cars.
It was "honestly one of the most horrific and difficult days that Farmington has ever had as a community," he said.
Former state Rep. James Strickler said among the three killed were an elderly mother and daughter who were both over the age of 70.
"Obviously this person is not of sound mind. It's tragic, because these poor ladies were innocent," Strickler said.
Officers began receiving reports of gunshots at about 10:57 a.m. and the first one arrived at the scene at 11:02 a.m., Hebbe said. Three minutes later, the gunman had been killed.
A Farmington officer was wounded and taken to a hospital where he was treated and released. A state police officer who was shot and drove himself to the hospital, where he remained Monday and was doing well, Hebbe said. That officer was reported to be in stable condition.
Joseph Robledo, a 32-year-old tree trimmer, said he rushed home after learning that his wife and year-old daughter had sought shelter in the laundry room when gunshots rang out. A bullet went through his daughter's window and room, without hitting anyone.
Robledo jumped a fence to get in through the back door. Out front, he found an older woman in the street who had been wounded while driving by. She appeared to have fallen out of her car, which kept rolling without her, he said.
"I went out to see because the lady was just lying in the road, and to figure just what the heck was going on," Robledo said. He and others began to administer first aid.
Neighbors directed an arriving police officer toward the suspect.
"We were telling (the officer), 'He's down there.' … The cop just went straight into action," Robledo said.
Robledo's own family car was perforated with bullets.
"We've been doing yard work all last week. I just thank God that nobody was outside in front," he said. "Obviously, elderly people — he didn't have no sympathy for them."
Downtown Farmington, which is a short drive from the residential neighborhood where the attack happened, has undergone a transformation of sorts in recent years, with cafes and breweries cropping up alongside decades-old businesses that trade in Native American crafts from silver jewelry to wool weavings.
Nick Akins, a middle school teacher who lives in the area where the attack occurred, said it's a great place to live, with a mix of homes, short-term rental apartments and churches.
"You never think it's going to happen here, and all of a sudden, in a tiny little town, it comes here," Akins said.
As night approached Monday, dozens of people gathered at Hills Church, a few miles from the attack scene, to pray at the base of a tall metal cross. Lead pastor Matt Mizell talked about living in a "dark and broken world" but told the crowd there was still hope and asked God to provide them strength.
Politicians also weighed in about the attack.
Mayor Nate Duckett said in a statement that the shooting "has left us reeling in anguish and disbelief."
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that she was praying for the families of those killed and that it "serves at yet another reminder of how gun violence destroys lives in our state and our country every single day."
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents the area in Congress, said in a Facebook post that "our beautiful Nuevo Mexico is not immune to the mass shootings that occur across the country — Every. Single. Day."
"I praise the heroes who drove to danger to stop the violence. I pray for the quick recovery of the wounded and for the families of those we lost," she said.
___
Ritter reported from Las Vegas, Nevada, and Lee from Santa Fe. Associated Press writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed.
Pojoaque school board prepares for local election - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
The Board of Education for the Pojoaque Valley School District on May 10 made preparations for the local election happening this fall.
Board members approved a resolution notifying the Santa Fe County Clerk there will be three positions on the board which will come up for election this year.
New Mexico’s local election will be held on Nov. 7. The four-year terms for three seats on the board will end on Dec. 31.
People interested in running for office must formally declare their candidacy between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 29, according to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office.
The positions opening up this year are currently held by three people that won their seats in 2019. Toby Velasquez, who ran unopposed, Felix Benavidez, who defeated Jeffrey Atencio; and Adam Muller, who defeated Fernando Quintana.
Board members also approved a resolution proposing a ballot question to set aside tax revenue for capital improvements.
A representative from Cuddy & McCarthy, LLP told board members the ballot question, if passed by voters, would set aside $2 per $1,000 in value of taxable property.
The last renewal was in 2019, they said. 68% of voters living in the school district’s boundaries voted in favor of a similar ballot question that year, according to official voting results.
The district could use the revenue from the property taxes for buildings, teacher housing, technical training and school buses.
The new ballot question would cover the tax years 2025 through 2030.
“We do that now so that in the event you don’t have a successful election, you do have the time to go back and try again, before you don’t have money,” the attorney told the school board.
The district has not posted copies of the resolutions on its website, and a representative for the school board did not respond to a written request for them.
Biden plan to sell land leases for conservation gets pushback - By Matthew Brown Associated Press
Biden administration officials on Monday sought to dispel worries they want to exclude oil drilling, livestock grazing and other activities from vast government-owned lands, as they faced pushback from Republicans and ranchers and over a contentious proposal to put conservation on equal footing with industry.
The proposal would allow conservationists and others to lease federally owned land to restore it, much the same way oil companies buy leases to drill and ranchers pay to graze cattle. Leases also could be bought on behalf of companies such as oil drillers who want to offset damage to public land by restoring acreage elsewhere.
But more than a century after the U.S. started selling grazing permits and oil and gas leases, the proposal is stirring debate over the best use of public land, primarily in the West. Opponents including Republican lawmakers and agriculture industry representatives are blasting it as a backdoor way to exclude mining, energy development and agriculture.
Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, told The Associated the proposed changes address rising pressure from climate change and development. She said it would make conservation an "equal" to grazing, drilling and other uses while not interfering with them.
The bureau has a history of industry-friendly policies for the 380,000 square miles (990,000 square kilometers) it oversees, an area more than twice the size of California. It also regulates publicly owned underground minerals, including oil, coal and lithium for renewable energy across more than 1 million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers).
Those holdings put the agency at the center of arguments over how much development should be allowed.
Senior bureau officials on Monday night hosted the first virtual public meeting about the conservation proposal. There was no opportunity for public comment, and questions for officials were screened by the agency. But officials acknowledged receiving numerous queries about grazing and drilling potentially being excluded.
Brian St. George, acting assistant director for the bureau, said the conservation leases would not "lock up land in perpetuity."
"It would have a term, and when that restoration goal is met, the term would lapse," he said.
U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who tried to block Stone-Manning's 2021 Senate confirmation, says the proposed rule is illegal.
Earlier this month he berated Interior Secretary Deb Haaland over it during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, saying she was "giving radicals a new tool to shut out the public."
"The secretary wants to make non-use a use," said Barrasso, the ranking Republican on the committee. "She is ... turning federal law on its head."
Stone-Manning told the AP that critics were misreading the rule, and that conservation leases would not usurp existing ones. If grazing is now permitted on a parcel, it could continue. And people could still hunt on the leased property or use it for recreation, she said.
"It makes conservation an equal among the multiple uses that we manage for," Stone-Manning said. "There are rules around how we do solar development. There are rules around how we do oil and gas. There have not been rules around how we deliver on the portions of (federal law) that say, 'Manage for fish and wildlife habitat, manage for clean water.'"
Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — where the federal land bureau controls about two thirds of the land — urged the administration to work with ranchers and farmers before finalizing the proposal, which the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said would "upend" land management in the West.
While the bureau previously issued leases for conservation in limited cases, it has never had a dedicated program for it.
Former President Donald Trump tried to ramp up fossil fuel development on bureau lands, but President Joe Biden suspended new oil and gas leasing when he entered office. Biden later revived the deals to win West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's support for last year's climate law.
Biden remains under intense pressure from Manchin and many Republicans to allow more drilling. Such companies currently hold leases across some 37,500 square miles (97,000 square kilometers) of bureau land.
The pending rule also would promote establishing more areas of "critical environmental concern" due to their historic or cultural significance, or their importance for wildlife conservation. More than 1,000 such sites covering about 33,000 square miles (85,000 square kilometers) have been designated previously.
By comparison, about 242,000 square miles (627,000 square kilometers) of bureau land are open to grazing livestock.
Environmentalists have largely embraced the changes, characterizing the proposal as long overdue.
Joel Webster with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of conservation groups and hunting and fishing organizations, said the administration's plan would set up a process to ensure landscapes are considered for conservation without forcing restrictions.
He cautioned, however, that administration officials must ensure a final rule doesn't have unintended consequences.
Another virtual event is slated for June 5 and public meetings are planned for May 25 in Denver; May 30 in Reno, Nevada; and June 1 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Low fertility rates, high housing prices mean fewer children in most states - Tim Henderson, Stateline via Source New Mexico
Thirty-five states have fewer children than they did five years ago, a situation caused by declining birth rates nationwide, but also by young families migrating across state borders in search of cheaper housing.
Even in the 15 states that gained children, all but North Dakota experienced greater growth in the adult population, meaning children now make up a lower percentage of residents.
In states where the number of children has declined, school officials are facing the possibility of teacher layoffs or even school closures when pandemic aid expires next year. A decline in school enrollment could provide short-term cost savings and might be a benefit to children if there are more resources to go around, but it bodes poorly for future state workforces.
In states where the drop in the number of children is part of a broader population decline, there will be additional fiscal, economic and political ramifications, such as diminished representation in Congress.
The states with the largest drops were California, Illinois and New Mexico, where the child population declined by 6% between 2017 and 2022, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. Idaho and North Dakota saw the largest increases, at 4%.
The declines mostly are a reflection of historically low fertility rates, which have been below the replacement rate of two children per woman since 2010. Births increased in only a handful of states in 2021.
But in the 35 states that experienced declines, high housing prices also are a factor. In California, jobs pay well but the state’s housing shortage has sent prices beyond the means of young families, said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.
“People want to buy a house and have children, but they realize they can’t do it here so they look in the vicinity, states close by, and work remotely so they can keep their California paychecks,” Johnson said.
Slow population growth cost California a seat in Congress after the 2020 census. The number of adults in California grew in the past five years, according to the Stateline analysis, but the decline in the number of children led to a lower overall population.
California also has experienced a phenomenon shared by other Western states: The children of Hispanic immigrants have lower birth rates than their parents. California’s total fertility rate dropped from 2.15 per woman in 2008 to a historic low of 1.52 in 2020, the lowest since records have been kept, Johnson wrote in a January report.
California, Illinois and New Mexico all have seen lower school enrollment in recent years, even as they’ve tried to rekindle interest in public education after pandemic upheavals.
In New Mexico, enrollment has dropped particularly sharply in the northwestern part of the state, where there are many Indigenous students, according to a January state report. Between 2012 and 2022, enrollment declined by 22% in the majority-Native Central Consolidated Schools in San Juan County, compared with a statewide decline of 7%, according to the report. Indigenous and other children in the mostly rural area struggle to stay in school because of long bus commutes and lack of internet access at home.
The recent closure of a coal mine and the power generating station it fueled forced many families with children to move away from San Juan County to find jobs, according to Central Consolidated school board President Christina Aspaas.
“A lot of Navajo workers who were employed had to relocate to Phoenix or elsewhere out of state to earn the same wages,” Aspaas said. “It affected the local tribes, Hopi and Navajo, Diné. Seeing the impacts makes my heart break. These are all my children, and they deserve the best in education and in life.”
In Idaho and North Dakota, annual school enrollment has increased over the past five years, except for temporary drops early in the pandemic. But Idaho is bracing for a decline starting in 2025, when children from a historic 2007 baby boom in the state start turning 18.
Idaho has become known as a picturesque and affordable place to raise children, said Jaap Vos, a planning professor at the University of Idaho in Boise. He relocated from Florida with his 3-year-old son in 2012, “when it was still the middle of nowhere,” he said. The number of adults in the state grew by 16% during the same period.
Boise is getting a lot of new residents from California, and northern Idaho is seeing more movers from Northern California, Washington and Utah. “It might be for ideological reasons, people looking for a more conservative lifestyle,” Vos said. He added that some people have left Boise as it has grown more crowded.
Even in northern Idaho, housing prices have risen rapidly.
Writer Leah Hampton is moving from North Carolina to Moscow in northern Idaho to teach at the University of Idaho. But she said she is having trouble finding an affordable house — even without children. Her husband is working remotely.
“Moscow is definitely a great place to raise kids. It’s like a 1950s movie up here but more diverse and left wing,” Hampton said. “All of my friends’ children seem really happy and well-adjusted. But cost of living is much higher than we expected. We have money and we literally can’t find anything to buy.”
Many houses are sold sight unseen to investors offering cash, she said.
Another fast-growing state with meager growth in the number of children is Florida, where a decrease in births and an increase in deaths over the past five years has created a negative drag on overall population, according to census estimates. The state had almost 25,000 more births than deaths in 2017, but there were 40,000 more deaths than births by 2022.
Still, Florida had the third-highest increase in child population between 2017 and 2022, at 2%. One reason: Hispanic births in Florida have continued to increase, unlike in Western states, said Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research. In fact, births are increasing for white, Black and Hispanic mothers in Florida, helping to offset some of the increasing deaths among the white population, Rayer said.
“Unless births increase substantially, because of the aging of Florida’s population, the state will likely see natural decrease for the foreseeable future, with all growth coming from migration,” Rayer said.