Attorney General declined to charge Santa Fe officer whose child fatally shot the other

Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s office decided not to prosecute a Santa Fe officer who left his gun out before one of his children fatally shot the other in 2022 at the family’s Rio Rancho home.

“At the time of this shooting, there was no specific legal duty for parents to secure their firearms accessible to children beyond the difficult-to-meet reckless endangerment standard in the child abuse statute,” according to a Sept. 1 declination letter from Deputy Attorney General Greer Staley.

Staley said the AG’s office agreed with previous Attorney General Hector Balderas, who also declined to prosecute the case, but found Santa Fe Police Department officer Jonathan Harmon kept the gun loaded and “not otherwise safeguarded” from his children.

Staley wrote that the Benny Hargrove Gun Safety Act — signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in March — may have applied to the case “had it been in force at the time” but couldn’t be used retroactively.

The act makes it a crime to fail to safely store firearms out of children’s reach.

“The passage of Benny’s Bill highlights the inadequacies of the previously existing child abuse laws and the need for that specific statute to fill the unintentional void they created,” Staley wrote in the letter. “After a review of other possible child abuse statutes, our office has determined that the facts here do not meet the elements required for prosecution under applicable laws.”

Harmon declined to comment to the Journal for this story.

The Rio Rancho Police Department investigated the Dec. 8, 2021, incident.

Harmon and his wife found their 2-year-old son Lincoln fatally shot in the kitchen with a gun lying nearby, according to police. Lincoln’s 4-year-old brother later told police he used a chair to get chewing gum from a cabinet and found his father’s gun, unintentionally shooting Lincoln with it.

Harmon told police he kept the gun in that cabinet and wondered whether the boys were fighting over it when the shooting occurred.

Benjamin Valdez, a spokesman with the Santa Fe Police Department, said on Sept. 5 Rio Rancho police notified them of the Torrez’s decision not to prosecute the case.

He said Harmon had been on alternate duty, “non-field work conducting administrative tasks,” throughout the investigation and the AG’s review.

“With this new information, Officer Harmon will return to full duty status and, as is standard operating procedure once an outside investigation is complete, the Department will initiate an Administrative Investigation into the matter,” Valdez said.

The case also led to a transparency dispute when Rio Rancho police repeatedly refused to release records to the Journal, the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government and Santa Fe New Mexican.

FOG and the New Mexican both filed a lawsuit over the denials, and then-Attorney General Balderas said Rio Rancho officials broke the law by failing to turn over the records.

Eventually, all records were released by Balderas’ office.