Killed – Jeanette Anaya (Santa Fe, NM) | Shot in the USA: Gun Violence After Newtown

It was about 1 a.m. on a cool November night when Jeremy Muñoz found himself riding in a Honda Accord at speeds up to 87 mph through a south-central Santa Fe neighborhood.

His friend, Jeanette Anaya, had decided she wasn’t going to pull over for a state police officer and was leading the officer on a chase, Muñoz said in an interview Wednesday. He was speaking publicly for the first time about the Nov. 7 incident, which ended with the officer fatally shooting the 39-year-old driver while Muñoz crouched on the floor of the car next to her.

As Anaya’s car sped down various streets and the siren wailed from the pursuing police car, Muñoz recalled, he kept turning his head to see what Officer Oliver Wilson would do.

He pleaded with Anaya to pull over, he said, but she told him she didn’t want to because there was a warrant for her arrest. The warrant was for a misdemeanor charge of concealing her identity during a traffic stop a few months earlier. She was trying to reach the home she shared with parents, Muñoz said.

“I told her to stop and not to worry about it,” Muñoz recalled. “If she went to jail … we could get her out.”

Anaya insisted she only wanted to get home and would deal with the police officer there, Muñoz said, adding that he didn’t know at the time something investigators would later discover: that Anaya had cocaine in her bloodstream.

“Everything was so chaotic,” he said, his voice quavering as he sat at a table in his lawyer’s office. “It’s kind of hard to say what exactly I was thinking at that point. Of course I wanted her to stop, but at the same time, I was afraid what the officer would do, you know. Even if we did stop, I wasn’t sure what he was going to do.”

The chase began when Wilson tried to pull over Anaya after seeing what he believed was a traffic violation as she rounded a corner at St. Francis Drive and Alta Vista Street. The officer later told fellow state police officers who investigated the incident that he wanted to “investigate if the driver was either impaired or advise the driver that their vehicle appeared to have mechanical issues,” based on a “wobbly turn” and what he had called a “California stop” — a rolling stop.

District Attorney Angela “Spence” Pacheco said based on video recorded by a dashboard camera in Wilson’s car, Anaya hadn’t committed any traffic violation.

Muñoz also said he didn’t think Anaya had committed any violations before the chase began.

About five minutes into the chase, Anaya made a turn onto Camino Carlos Rey, and Wilson used his squad car to bump her vehicle, a maneuver intended to stop it. This resulted in her Accord crashing into a cinderblock wall, according to police reports. Muñoz thought the chase was over. But, seconds after the crash, he felt the Accord back up. Then he heard gunshots.

Muñoz said he “went to panic mode” and ducked down under the dashboard. Anaya was hit by two of the 16 shots that investigators said Wilson fired that night.

A Santa Fe grand jury found that State Police were justified in shooting to death a woman after a car chase in November. Jeanette Anaya was shot in the head and back after police said she “aggressively” backed her car towards an officer.

“The Grand Jury of Santa Fe finds it to be a justifiable homicide,” First Judicial District Attorney Angela “Spence” Pacheco, told a news conference this afternoon.

Teresa Anaya said her daughter was murdered and the State Police officer who fired the fatal shots in the high-profile case was “enraged” and had “lost control.”

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/passenger-speaks-out-on-jeanette-anaya-s-fatal-chase/article_9ead1b4c-6a22-5e5a-8dfe-3ac6c2c3fc52.html

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/mother-of-jeanette-anaya-speaks-out-on-daughter-s-death/article_72eb7e0f-e885-5c5d-b003-e359a70b969c.html

http://www.abqjournal.com/337269/abqnewsseeker/grand-jury-finds-police-shooting-justified.html

http://www.koat.com/news/friend-of-jeanette-anaya-a-cop-murdered-her/25746540

http://www.abqjournal.com/337425/abqnewsseeker/shooting-justified-grand-jury-says-2.html