Five-day trial ends in hung jury in 2019 killing

A jury failed to reach a verdict Friday in the trial of a man charged in the 2019 shooting death of 43-year-old Leroy Zamora outside a Central Avenue motel.

Vicente Rivera, 35, remains charged with second-degree murder in Zamora’s shooting death at the Crossroads Motel near Central and Interstate 25.

A spokeswoman for the 2nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office said “it’s too early to tell” if prosecutors will retry Rivera.

Much of the closing arguments Friday hinged on phone and social media messages sent to and from Rivera’s phone that prosecutors argued implicated him in Zamora’s killing.

Rivera’s attorney, Richard Pugh, told jurors that Zamora’s phone had been lost or stolen in the days before the killing and that someone else had sent the messages.

Both defense and prosecution attorneys said in opening statements Monday that jurors were likely to be left at the end of the trial with unanswered questions about the 5-year-old killing.

“You have absolutely no idea who shot Leroy Zamora,” Pugh told jurors on Friday. “You will never know the circumstances of the shooting.”

Prosecutors told jurors that Zamora was in the passenger seat of a car when Rivera fatally shot him from the driver’s seat on Feb. 18, 2019.

Zamora exited the car and took several steps before collapsing in the parking lot of the Crossroads Motel, prosecutor Emile Edmonds told jurors. Zamora later died at University of New Mexico Hospital.

Pugh suggested to jurors on Friday that Zamora was fatally shot by someone standing above him, possibly from the motel balcony. Pugh also said that Zamora had multiple enemies as a result of his lifestyle as a heroin user.

Zamora’s longtime partner, Brianna Pinzon, testified this week that Zamora’s heroin use prompted her to kick him out of her home less than a week before he was killed.

She forced Zamora to leave her home after he left a used syringe in a place in their home where their son found it, she testified on Monday.

Pinzon said outside the courtroom on Friday that Zamora had been “a great fiancé to me” and a good father to the couple’s son. “He was funny and he was outgoing,” she said.

A police spokesman said days after the killing that police had “limited offender information” at the time. An autopsy found that Zamora was fatally shot in the arm and the chest.

Witnesses told police they saw a red car diving out of the parking lot moments after the shooting, Edmonds told jurors.

Prosecutors argued that the car involved in the shooting was later found gutted by fire in an arroyo near 12th and Menaul NW.