Good Guy with a Gun #53: Clovis, NM
Original incident: December 4, 2023. If you're so drunk that your brother calls the cops on you, you probably shouldn't try to break into someone else's house.
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It seems that 21-year-old Judas Naranjo really needed to lay off the sauce on Monday nights.
Around 10 PM, he got “really drunk” at his brother’s house. Bro tried to get Naranjo to leave because he was “intoxicated and aggressive,” but Naranjo didn’t want to go.
So bro called the cops. By the time they arrived, Naranjo had decided maybe he should leave after all.
But he hadn’t gone far. Bro’s house was in the 100 block of Rosa Boulevard. Naranjo only made it to the 200 block — maybe a couple hundred yards — before he found a place that he decided was his home.
It was 11 PM by then, and (unbeknownst to Naranjo, of course) the police were just finishing up at bro’s house.
Naranjo started pounding on the front door, waking up the homeowner who, naturally, didn’t want to let him in. Naranjo may have been drunk, stupid, and wrong, but at least he was confident: He yelled, “This is my house, I come here if I want to.”
The homeowner called 911 to let the police know that someone was breaking into his home. This call was just six minutes after police had closed the call at bro’s house.
While the police were on the way, the homeowner warned Naranjo that he was armed and would shoot him if he came in.
At which point, go figure, Naranjo kicked in the front door and came inside.
The homeowner warned Naranjo one final time that he was armed. Since Naranjo didn’t leave, go figure, the homeowner fired one shot from his revolver, dropping Naranjo with a critical wound.
“I didn’t want him getting ahold of me,” he told police later. “I didn’t want him getting into the house.” And his gunshot did stop the threat:
He then called 911 and told the police that he had shot the intruder and that they needed an ambulance.
Fortunately for Naranjo, his critical injury didn’t kill him. He was flown to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas — about 100 miles away — where he made most of his recovery. As of December 22, 2023, he was recovering the rest of the way at home.
Also at that time, the police were ready to charge him with breaking and entering. Things must be pretty mellow in that part of New Mexico: Clovis Police Captain Robert Telles said, “We’re going to let him recover a little more before we serve the warrant. He’s not hiding at all.”
Sources
The name of the homeowner is available from court records, but I’m not using it because I don’t see any news source where he voluntarily gave it for publication.
The runaway best source for this story was from an unaffiliated local news source called The Eastern New Mexico News, “Your Source for Local News,” serving Clovis, Portales, Tucumcari and the Surrounding Communities. David Stevens used police and court records to really flesh out the story, and is the only source for things like the police at the brother’s house. It’s not the most linear retelling of what happened, but that’s because he’s trying to structure it like a news story — telling it in a more linear fashion is my job. Great work here by the local team.
The Clovis PD put a news release out on their website and on Facebook early on, and updated the website and created a Facebook update when Naranjo was identified.
KFDA NewsChannel 10 did okay on this: I appreciate the fact that they gave 30 seconds to the story on TV for the initial story and the follow-up when Naranjo was identified, but they didn’t really go farther than summarizing the news releases.
Everything Lubbock was similar, with an initial story and a follow-up that summarized the news releases, but no TV/video coverage.
Same thing with KVII ABC 7 News: Decent initial story and follow-up, no TV/video coverage.
As far as I can tell, KCBD 11 and KQRE both just posted a story once Naranjo was identified.
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
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