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Evonne Jaramillo after she was arrested Friday and booked into jail

Evonne Jaramillo was arrested Friday afternoon after she failed – at least for the third time – to show up for a scheduled court hearing on the murder and conspiracy charges she faces in the death of her boyfriend’s elderly aunt, Josephina Ortega.

Police say Jaramillo and her boyfriend, Craig Smith, went to Ortega’s home near Indian School and Juan Tabo last May, zip-tied the 86-year-old woman’s hands together and placed a plastic bag over her head. Police say the woman suffocated. Cash and jewelry were reported missing from her house.

A grand jury indicted the couple in April, and Jaramillo was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy, kidnapping, aggravated burglary and tampering with evidence.

She was ordered to come to court for a detention hearing but failed to appear, prosecutor John Duran said Friday. He said officials believed she was in rehab at the time. Court records aren’t clear on this hearing.

She was also scheduled to appear for an arraignment and detention hearing on April 11, and again failed to appear.

At this point, an arrest warrant was issued and she was picked up on April 17.

At her next hearing on April 23, prosecutors asked that she be held in jail pending trial based on the charges.

State District Judge Charles Brown rejected that request and released her from jail that day on her own recognizance, meaning with no bond posted, with instructions to be put on pre-trial services monitoring, stay in contact with monitoring staff and to seek legal counsel.

The court’s background risk assessment ranked her as needing an intermediate level of supervision. The assessments use a person’s criminal and court appearance background to assign a risk level of danger to re-offend while waiting to appear for court hearings.

Under the state constitution, prosecutors can ask for a judge to keep dangerous defendants in jail pending trial.

A judge has discretion in using the risk assessment ranking with other factors to determine how defendants will live pending trial.

Such release ranges from defendants simply walking out of jail with a promise to return to being placed on an ankle monitor and daily testing or supervision.

District Attorney Raúl Torrez, through his spokesman, said Brown’s decision was “frustrating.”

“It’s a person charged with first-degree murder. That level of dangerousness alone is a reason we seek preventative detention,” said Torrez’s spokesman Michael Patrick. “There was enough there that we felt she represented a danger to the community, and now that she’s (failed to appear) four times, it kind of reinforces our position.”

After Jaramillo was released on her own recognizance, prosecutors moved to have her release re-evaluated and a hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

Jaramillo, who is not charged with committing any crimes while out on pretrial release, showed up more than an hour late, but a judge decided it wasn’t clear if she’d been given proper notice of the hearing by pretrial monitoring staff. The hearing was rescheduled for Friday, court spokesman Sidney Hill said Friday.

“There were questions as to whether she had been given adequate notice of that (Thursday) hearing,” Hill said.

But Jaramillo did not show up on time on Friday either, and state District Judge Briana Zamora issued a warrant for her arrest.

“There is no doubt in my mind she knew about this” hearing, Zamora said.

Jaramillo eventually did show up at the courthouse and while looking for her courtroom identified herself. She was taken into custody at the courthouse, Hill said.

She will now face another round of pretrial detention hearings.

“In her particular case, based on the facts that were presented, we felt she should not be out standing behind someone in a grocery aisle,” Patrick said.

In the past, the DA’s Office has been critical of the risk assessment tool used by judges in helping determine whether someone should be detained. It points out that the tool fails to take into account enough factors such as prior arrests (even those that haven’t led to convictions) and underestimates the danger some defendants pose.

Supporters of the risk assessment tool say it is a data-driven method for predicting who will re-offend if let out of jail pending trial, and research shows that over-incarcerating defendants increases re-offense and burdens jails with unnecessary population. Over-incarcerating also tends to affect poor people disproportionately.

Meanwhile, Smith, 55, is in jail awaiting trial in another homicide case – the killing of 56-year-old Terry Williams, whose body was found burning in the woods off a road near Cedro Peak in the East Mountains in April 2017.

Jaramillo’s case was the second high-profile case this month drawing Torrez’s ire regarding decisions to release defendants pending trial.

Prosecutors had asked Judge Brown on April 10 to keep defendant Charles Taylor in jail pending trial on auto-theft charges, but Taylor was released. On the public safety assessment, Taylor was recommended for release to pretrial services with maximum supervision meaning drug and alcohol testing by request and avoiding all contact with witnesses or offenders. Brown also authorized the use of GPS tracking but it was not utilized by pre-trial services.

He was arrested about a week later on suspicion of raping a woman police say he accosted after asking her to borrow a lighter. He is accused of kicking in the door of her apartment, then beating, tying her up and raping her over a two-hour assault.