Man tied to earlier threat that closed district arrested

Police in Albuquerque have arrested a 23-year-old man in connection with a Taos school shooting threat that spurred Taos Municipal Schools District administrators to close all district campuses on Friday (Aug. 19).

Stephen E. Archuleta was arrested by New Mexico State Police on Aug. 20 and subsequently charged with one misdemeanor count of making a bomb scare or shooting threat. The threat last month closed Taos, Anansi and Vista Grande charter schools. Schools reopened the following week.

Archuleta — whom Interim Superintendent Valerie Trujillo described as a “former student” in the Taos school district — was living in the Albuquerque-Rio Rancho area at the time he is accused of making the school threat via social media.

According to an Aug. 19 affida

vit for arrest, a woman called state police to request a welfare check on Archuleta, “due to her friend Stephen posting a message on [Instagram] of him wanting to cut his wrist and stating, ‘Don’t be mad when more schools get shot up this year.’”

Archuleta has a history of interactions with law enforcement resulting from alleged threatening or violent behavior, court records show. He pleaded not guilty to the charge filed this month and was ordered released on a $2,000 bond with several conditions of release.

According to an order filed in Taos County Magistrate Court on Aug. 29, one of the conditions stipulated that Archuleta undergo an intake at Taos Behavioral Health, which declined to accept him as a patient. Archuleta was given several other treatment options, but Rio Grande Substance and Alcohol Abuse also informed Archuleta that he was “ineligible for their services,” according to court documents.

It is unclear from court documents whether Archuleta is still in custody at this time, if he had been released, transferred to another detention facility or admitted to a treatment facility. He is not currently listed as an inmate at the Taos County Adult Detention Center.

At the time of his arrest for the alleged school threat, Archuleta had a case pending in Sandoval County Magistrate Court in Bernalillo, where he is accused of “use of telephone to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend,” stemming from a June 6 incident in which Archuleta allegedly sent threatening text messages to his father.

According to a criminal complaint, Archuleta’s father told a Rio Rancho Police Department dispatch officer that his son sent him multiple threatening text messages, including one message stating, “I am going to kill you, I have to kill you.”

The officer wrote in the complaint that the original dispatch call notes for the welfare check request cautioned that Archuleta “is extremely hostile and assaultive to law enforcement.”

According to the complaint, Archuleta’s father explained to police that “his son has extreme mental issues,” for which Archuleta “has been diagnosed and treated, but [for which he] has been off his medication lately due to his grandmother convincing him he is not sick.”