Santa Clara man convicted in 2023 slaying

A jury in Silver City on Thursday convicted Jamie Rodriguez, 29, of second-degree murder and other charges in the 2023 shooting of Ruben Morales in Santa Clara.

On the night of Aug. 27, 2023, Grant County sheriff’s deputies responding to an emergency call found Morales in the driver’s seat of his car, wounded by gunfire and unresponsive, with his 10-year-old son crying in the backseat. The car had stopped at an intersection and the engine was running.

An eyewitness told the deputies that Rodriguez, a neighborhood resident, had approached Morales’ vehicle with a handgun and fired several shots at the driver from a distance of a few feet. The witness said that Rodriguez had just had an angry argument with Morales’ brother outside of Rodriguez’s home, during which Rodriguez had produced a shotgun and the other man quickly left the scene. According to an arrest warrant affidavit, the witness told deputies the shooting was “straight up cold-blooded murder.”

Other witnesses said the argument with Morales’ brother stemmed from a confrontation earlier in the day when Rodriguez pursued three teenagers riding in off-road vehicles near Ft. Bayard. Witnesses said Rodriguez drove his jeep aggressively around the four-wheelers, nearly colliding with them and yelling at them. One witness told law enforcement Rodriguez said, “Don’t be throwing dust in my face.”

Morales’ brother, a relative of the children involved in that encounter, told law enforcement he approached Rodriguez to ask why he had pursued the children and left when Rodriguez pointed a shotgun at him. Prosecutors said Rodriguez then approached Morales, who had stopped at the nearby intersection in his car, and opened fire.

Morales was 32 years old. According to his obituary, he was a father to seven children, an avid four-wheeler himself and a manager at a Family Dollar store.

Prosecutors had sought conviction on first-degree murder, which includes willful, deliberate and premeditated murder; but the jury instead found Rodriguez guilty of second-degree murder, which addresses “heat of passion” or non-premeditated killing of a human being.

The jury also convicted Rodriguez of six additional felony charges of tampering with evidence, abuse of a child and four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Rodriguez has been in custody since 2023 under a pretrial detention order and now awaits a sentencing hearing. 

Algernon D’Ammassa is the Journal’s southern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at adammassa@abqjournal.com.