One year later, Farmington Police reflect on 2023 mass shooting

Sierra Tafoya, chief of operations for the Farmington Police Department, remembers running downstairs from her office on the second floor of police headquarters on a sunny Monday morning in May last year to grab her body armor when the first calls began to pour into the dispatch center that a gunman had opened fire on civilians in a neighborhood just north of downtown Farmington.

Though she had only the barest of information at that point, the nature of the calls — and the frequency with which they were coming in — told Tafoya a major incident was unfolding, and she knew she would be well advised to grab her protective gear before responding.

“I knew multiple people had been hit, and multiple people were calling,” she said. “There was one, maybe two shooters involved.”

She had no way of knowing, but Tafoya’s response was being duplicated by law enforcement officers all over San Juan County on May 15, 2023, shortly before and after 11 a.m. — a time when they normally would be thinking about breaking for lunch. Indeed, in the case of three of the officers who were among the first to respond to the scene, a three-block stretch of North Dustin Avenue between East Ute Street on the north and East Hopi Street on the south, that’s exactly what they were doing — driving to lunch together, having just pulled out of the parking lot at police headquarters on Municipal Drive a few miles west of where the incident was taking place.

Timeline of a tragedy: A minute-by-minute account of Farmington, New Mexico mass shooting

Within just a few minutes, those three officers — Officer Brandon Downs, Sgt. Jasper Domenici and Officer Joseph Bareto, all dressed in civilian clothes and without body armor — would arrive at the scene and begin to assess what was happening, where they were joined moments later by Sgt. Rachel Discenza and Officer Ben Jemmett, who arrived separately in their own patrol cars. At that point, the officers knew there was a well-armed, active shooter, one who already had left a trail of bodies, blood, shell casings, bullet holes and shattered glass behind him — a remarkable toll for a rampage that had started only minutes earlier.

The members of that quintet huddled briefly behind a vegetation-covered fence at the south end of the parking lot of the First Presbyterian Church of Farmington at 900 N. Dustin Ave. Having already laid eyes on the shooter — a trim, young man clad all in black — they knew he was still moving south down Dustin Avenue and had to be stopped as quickly as possible. The urgency of the situation was clear, leaving the officers no time to wait for backup or instructions from superiors.

The decision was made to try to eliminate the shooter. The officers quickly got to their feet, crouching behind the fence and moving single file to the east, finally emerging from their cover on to the sidewalk on the west side of Dustin, their weapons raised. Advancing cautiously, they walked only a few feet before spotting the gunman, who had positioned himself in front of a white building on the same side of the street, later identified as the First Church of Christ, Scientist at 713 N. Dustin Ave.

Almost immediately, an exchange of shots rang out. Discenza staggered, calling out, “I’m shot!” and falling to the pavement, having been struck in her hip. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain her footing, she collapsed on the pavement as the gunfire continued.

Almost simultaneously, to her left, Jemmett — firing from a fully exposed position in the middle of Dustin Avenue — unleashed several rounds from his rifle. Abruptly, he stopped, lowered his weapon and called out to his fellow officers.

“Subject down! Subject is down!” he yelled. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

Yards away, the gunman — an 18-year-old Farmington High School senior named Beau Wilson who was set to graduate with his class the next day — was stretched out on the ground, unresponsive and mortally wounded. Nearby were a bulletproof vest he had discarded and a .22 caliber handgun he had emptied before firing his last shot from a 9 mm handgun, his only remaining weapon.

In just 10 minutes — between 10:56 a.m., when he fired his first shots at passing motorists with an AR-15 from the front porch of his father’s home Dustin Avenue, and 11:06 a.m., when he was shot by Farmington police — he had killed three people, shot two others and caused several other bystanders to suffer injuries from broken glass, carving out a dark and bloody legacy for himself in the city’s history. An autopsy report later would reveal that Wilson had been struck nine times by gunfire from responding officers.

Law enforcement wrestles with the possibility of a second shooter

The immediate threat posed by Wilson was over. But the members of the Farmington Police Department’s command team — including Tafoya, Chief Steve Hebbe, Deputy Chief Kyle Dowdy, Deputy Chief Baric Crum, Lt. Corban Davis and Capt. Nate Lacey, many of whom began arriving at the scene just moments after the echoes of the final gunshots ended — hardly had time to catch their breath or even begin to survey the carnage before other urgent demands presented themselves.

To begin with, because of the volume of calls still pouring into the dispatch center and a series of other circumstances they were not yet aware of, they believed the chances were good that a second gunman was lurking in the area, preparing to wreak more havoc. Dowdy said more than 250 calls were received by emergency dispatch during and after the shooting — approximately five times the normal call volume.

Even when that fear of another shooter had been put aside approximately an hour later, police leaders knew the demand for answers about how and why the incident had occurred would be immediate and fierce. A maelstrom of misinformation swirled about them, leaving law enforcement struggling to make sense of what they were hearing and hampering their efforts to develop an accurate narrative for the day’s shocking events.

Nearly a year later, during an interview in which the events of May 15, 2023, were revisited by him and his leadership team, Hebbe, who was visiting his father in Wisconsin during the shooting and was monitoring developments over the phone with Dowdy and Crum as information began to trickle in, would still wrestle with the task of finding a satisfactory way to describe the challenges his department faced that day. He finally gave up, heaving a sigh and appearing to settle on characterizing it in the most straightforward way possible.

“It was an epic day,” he said simply.

'That's the worst radio transmission you can get'

As the department’s special operations commander, Davis helped coordinate that initial response by Farmington police and later took charge at the department’s mobile command unit that was set up in the parking lot of the old Tibbets Middle School south of the scene.

He recalled being at the station when the incident started and listening to the radio traffic from his officers as they arrived at the scene and encountered Wilson. Their fateful encounter with the shooter in front of the church quickly yielded a distressing transmission.

“Hey, Sarge (Discenza) is down! We need help right now!” one of his officers reported from the scene.

Davis felt his stomach muscles clench.

“That’s the worst radio transmission you can get,” he said.

Moments later, with the gunman having been taken down and Discenza, who had sustained a nonlife-threatening injury, being sped to the hospital in a vehicle driven by Sgt. Martin Olsen, the tension eased a bit. But when other officers began arriving at the scene, what they saw jarred them.

“It was like a literal Wild West scene,” said Dowdy, one of the department’s deputy chiefs. “There was gunfire in the streets, glass, bullet casings, cars with blown-out tires, bullet holes in every building I’m looking at.”

And, of course, there were bodies. Within seconds of beginning his violent spree, Wilson had shot Gwendolyn Scholfield, 98, and Melody Ivie, 73 (mother and daughter); as well as 79-year-old Shirley Voita as they passed by the front of his father’s house in their vehicles. Crum, the department’s other deputy chief, said the memory of seeing Scholfield and Ivie, already dead in the front seat of their car, and Ivie, mortally wounded but still possessing enough survival instinct to crawl away from her vehicle, are something he will never forget.

But there was little time to dwell on those scenes. As home security footage later would reveal, Wilson’s shooting rampage was accompanied by a running commentary from the shooter as he taunted the police or anyone else who was listening to come get him. Dowdy said Wilson essentially was providing a narrative of his actions as he moved from the front porch of his father’s house south on Dustin Avenue, eventually holing up in front of the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

Wilson’s decision to perform a play-by-play of his actions resulted in some serious confusion even after he was shot by police. Residents of the area flooded the dispatch center with 911 calls, and many of them believed the shooter — rather than talking to himself — was communicating with a nearby partner who might also be firing randomly at passersby, homes and automobiles.

“People on the scene are telling us he’s talking to someone,” Dowdy said. “But no one (among the first responders) saw a second shooter. It wasn’t until we did a review of the video that we realized he’s talking to himself and yelling at us.”

While being kept abreast of developments over the phone as he prepared to depart Wisconsin and head back to Farmington, Hebbe said he had his doubts about the existence of a second shooter. Reports of a second shooter are common in the confusion surrounding mass shootings and other violent events, he said, and the chief believed that would turn out to be the case in this situation, as well.

But another development had thrown some fuel on the second-shooter flame. Unbeknownst to Farmington police, a New Mexico State Police officer, Andreas Stamatiadas, also had rushed to the scene, approaching it from the south, Davis said. As he made his way toward the church, Wilson apparently spotted Stamatiadas coming toward him and opened fire, shooting him in the left forearm.

Stamatiadas turned his State Police cruiser around and drove himself to the San Juan Regional Medical Center. The dispatch center used by State Police is different from the one used by Farmington police, so he did not have a chance to communicate his whereabouts or condition to the group of five responding officers who ultimately stopped Wilson. When he showed up at the hospital with a gunshot wound minutes later, it contributed significantly to the fear that a second gunman was still on the loose.

So did the number of people in the neighborhood who had not been shot but were suffering from wounds created by shattered glass. In the still-hectic moments following the shooting, it was impossible to know who had been shot and who had suffered collateral damage, police said. Afterward, it was learned that in addition to the fatalities — Scholfield, Ivie, Voita and Wilson — 16 people were injured during the incident, seven of whom were treated at the scene.

Davis said the deluge of citizen reports from the dispatch center also came with different, often contradictory descriptions of the shooter, feeding the notion that two assailants had been involved. So did the evidence police found at the scene, which included a variety of shell casings. Wilson had begun his attack by firing an AR-15, which he abandoned in front of his father’s house when he emptied the magazine, then moved on to a .22 caliber handgun and eventually the 9 mm handgun.

The shell casings found from those weapons, distinctly different from the ammunition fired by Farmington police officers, fit into the multiple-shooters scenario, Dowdy said.

“It made sense that there were two shooters,” he said.

As a result, the Farmington police officers and other law enforcement officials who poured into the scene in the aftermath of the shooting began a hurried, house-by-house, street-by-street search of the area for the feared second shooter. Dowdy said more than a dozen houses were searched.

“We had people going down parallel roads to make sure he had not made it out of that zone,” Crum said.

That search was complicated by the dozens of area residents who, quite naturally, came pouring out of their homes once they saw police swarming the streets, many of them armed with their personal weapons. That presented a potentially dangerous situation in and of itself, Dowdy said, explaining that officers had no idea what the second gunman looked like and easily could have mistaken an armed citizen for a second shooter.

That didn’t happen, but in those tense moments, it wasn’t hard to envision such a scenario unfolding, said Lacey, a captain who oversees internal affairs, in light of the department's recent history.

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A little more than a month earlier, Farmington police had been involved in a highly publicized incident in which local homeowner Robert Dotson, armed with a handgun, had answered his door late at night after a knock by three officers who had mistakenly approached his home instead of a nearby residence where a domestic dispute had been reported.

Dotson had been shot dead after allegedly raising his gun toward the officers, unleashing a torrent of criticism of the department and leading to the filing of a federal lawsuit by Dotson’s family. Hebbe, who had faced calls for his resignation, labeled the shooting a tragic accident.

Lacey was grateful and relieved a similar incident had not taken place this time, but things easily could have unfolded differently, he said.

“The penalty for getting that wrong is high,” he said, then referring to the conflicting reports the officers were receiving. “There were so many different flows of information.”

Davis had made it to the scene within 20 minutes, and within 40 minutes the department’s mobile command unit had arrived and was set up in the Tibbets parking lot. By noon, when the circumstances of Stamatiadas’ shooting were conveyed to them, Dowdy said, he and other department officials had come to believe there was no second shooter, easing the tension considerably.

Farmington Police transition from crisis mode to crisis management

Thus began the process of piecing together the morning’s events and providing an explanation to city leaders, the media, citizens and, especially, the victims' families. It would still take nearly three hours before Farmington police would convene an impromptu news conference outside the mobile command unit where they offered a basic outline of what had taken place. But Dowdy said it took that long for police themselves to develop a basic understanding of what had transpired.

As the incident commander, Davis was charged with containing the scene for investigative purposes — no small feat, considering it was not a single room or structure, but a three-block residential and business area where dozens of civilians were moving about, along with dozens of other law enforcement officers, emergency medical personnel and firefighters.

“We had teams working the scene from both directions, annotating the damage,” Davis said.

That damage was extensive, with many homes and businesses in the area taking gunfire, while shattered windshields and blown-out tires were common sights in vehicles along Dustin Avenue.

Dowdy said he understood Farmington leaders and citizens were desperate for information, but he was determined not to become the source of false information.

“I want the community members to feel safe, so we released a little bit of information to try to ease some fears,” he said. “But we don’t know why this happened. We don’t know for certain this is over. For all we know, there could be a copycat shooter out there or this could have just been a diversion.”

Dowdy, who had provided the Aztec Police Department shooting with assistance when a shooter killed two students at Aztec High School in 2017, said he has come to realize that dealing with the aftermath of a highly publicized shooting can present almost as many challenges as the incident itself.

Not only were calls streaming into the department from other police agencies around the state, he said, but even the White House had called offering help. Simply managing and organizing those calls for help was an enormous job.

“We’ve got a couple of us who are dealing with the external elements,” Dowdy said, referring to those outside calls. “We’re very well trained in how to deal with an active shooter. But we’re not as well trained in having a press conference.”

The switch from crisis mode to crisis containment was a difficult one, he said, especially as his fears of a second shooter lingered.

“This felt uncontrollable at times,” he said. “It felt like it had broken containment. It didn’t feel safe to me. It didn’t feel controlled.”

That didn’t stop emergency medical personnel from acting quickly to treat the folks who had been injured, he said, even though it wasn’t yet assumed that the shooting was over.

“They were phenomenal,” Dowdy said. “They were in the middle of it fast, asking, ‘What can we do?’ They were getting in the middle of a very dangerous situation. … It didn’t feel like the shooting was done.”

Nevertheless, the demand for information from the public was growing almost by the second — something Hebbe could sense even remotely from Wisconsin.

But, like Dowdy, Hebbe was dead set against giving into that pressure and releasing any information that hadn’t been verified.

“We’re trying to tell the community as much information you can as fast as you can, but you want that information to be right,” he said, “There were competing pressures. It isn’t that we don’t want to put information. It almost always helps us to have that information out there. There’s a balance you have to achieve — is anything I’m putting out there false and potentially hurting people?  But you know darn well people want answers.”

Crum said some of those answers only became evident in the hours and days following the shooting as investigators were able to piece together Wilson’s actions during, up to and preceding the shooting. When his body was recovered, they found a message he had scrawled on two Post-it Notes, which read, “If (you’re reading this I’m (at) the end of the chapter. Lay eyes or (dare) put a finger on my little sister I (promise) there will be regrets.”

Information that Wilson’s family shared with investigators days later would reveal the young man was experiencing mental health issues, Hebbe said. But no details have been released regarding how those issues may have led him to act out the way he did on May 15, 2023, or even if he had been receiving treatment for those issues.

Wilson also was well prepared for his anticipated confrontation with police, as a subsequent search of his father’s home turned up a backpack stuffed with more than 200 rounds of ammo that had been placed near the door. Why he left that bag behind remains unknown, but the fact that he did likely prevented a good deal more bloodshed, police said.

Those details helped fill in many of the blanks for police, but they didn’t necessarily make the incident any easier to stomach, even for law enforcement personnel supposedly accustomed to dealing with violent incidents. Dowdy said the first 24 hours, in particular, left him little time to reflect on what he had seen, especially as he and Crum became the public face of the department at news conferences while Hebbe continued to drive back from Wisconsin.

“I didn’t have a chance to decompress or process,” Dowdy said, adding that it was hours before he or any other member of the department even had the time to have a significant phone conversation with their spouse or partner to let them know they were all right.

A measure of redemption for a beleaguered department

Now, nearly a year later, that processing is still going on. Hebbe, who made it back to Farmington early on the Wednesday after the shooting, said he takes enormous satisfaction in the way his officers responded that day, especially with him out of town.

“I don’t know that you could have asked for better, given what we faced,” he said. “You had a shooter walking down the street with multiple guns and the determination he had, that he was going to battle it out. There were a lot of things working against us.”

Among those elements was the lingering distrust and disrespect many citizens had developed for Hebbe’s department in the long shadow of the Robert Dotson shooting, something of which the chief was all too aware.

More: Farmington police chief acknowledges shooting of homeowner impacted citizen trust

“It had been a long six weeks for us,” he said. “We had been going through our lowest popularity ever for those six weeks.”

But when they were asked to confront a well-armed shooter apparently intent on inflicting as much damage as he could on a quiet neighborhood, the five Farmington officers who initially responded to the scene eliminated the threat posed by Wilson quickly and efficiently, helping their department perhaps achieve a measure of redemption. That stood in stark contrast to the actions, or lack thereof, of hundreds of law enforcement officers at a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, nearly a year earlier that claimed the lives of 21 children and teachers — an incident that has come to epitomize a bungled law enforcement response to a mass shooter.

“It was an outstanding response,” Hebbe said of his officers’ actions that day.

The chief said he was especially proud of the way all his officers put aside the controversy over the Dotson shooting and did their job on May 15.

“Those things did not impact us at the moment of truth,” he said.

Lacey said the five officers who worked together to neutralize Wilson set the tone for everything that followed — and he believes they understood exactly what they were facing. Dowdy characterized what they did as nothing short of heroic.

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“If those first cops on the scene don’t do their job, nothing else matters,” Lacey said. “If we don’t get anything else right, we’ve got to get that part right.”

Tafoya said she thought the entire department rose to the occasion, both initially and in the hours and days that followed.

“It wasn’t any one of us (during) the fog of it,” she said, describing how broad the leadership was. “It was the little things everybody did that day that speak to the team response.”

Dowdy said there was no internal conflict, no behind-the-scenes turf battles that went on as the department’s leadership team divvied up tasks and started addressing issues.

“You’ve got to put egos aside,” he said. “Rank, tenure, whatever, there’s not a perfect solution. The question was always, what do we do next? Everyone had the ability to adapt and understand there’s more to do in a situation like this than pull rank.”

That didn’t prevent him and other officers from harboring some doubts, especially in the middle of the crisis, Dowdy said.

“Throughout that day, I don’t know how many times I heard, ‘What are we missing?’” he said. “ … It was never like we rested, and now we can breathe. … You don’t let that mean, ‘OK, now we’re starting back down the road to normalcy.’”

That second guessing wasn’t limited to Hebbe’s command team. The chief himself said he grapples everyday with the idea that the shooting should have never taken place, shouldering the responsibility for it himself.

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“I thought I failed that day,” Hebbe said, though he acknowledged he is at a loss to identify what he would have done to prevent it. “You’re left with a sense of defeat. That sense of failure hangs with me — not every day, but you get me talking, and it’s there.”

The chief said the shooting has impacted his decision making, citing it as one of the reasons he decided to have the department partner with New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit organization, on a gun buy-back event in Farmington in December 2023. The event was cancelled after some citizens complained to other city officials about it, once again drawing Hebbe into controversy.

More: Citing citizen complaints, Farmington officials suspend gun buy-back

“I was ready to try things maybe I wouldn’t have done before,” he said, explaining his decision making.

Hebbe said it has been all but impossible for him not to take the incident personally, despite the professional distance he knows he must maintain as a law enforcement officer.

“It was depressing as hell that that happened,” he said. “ … I’m left with, what could we have done on the front end to prevent it? And I think we are making some progress in San Juan County. .. In this case, we just didn’t get the indicators.”

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This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: One year later, Farmington Police reflect on 2023 mass shooting