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Elizabeth Ortiz-Chavez (Albuquerque Police Department).
“You’ve got to be lying to me about that car,” Elizabeth Ortiz-Chavez told Albuquerque cops in interrogation footage dated March 4, 2022.
They had just confronted her with the allegation that her car was at the scene where someone shot and killed 16-year-old Josue Ruiz behind a diner. Authorities would first charge Ortiz-Chavez’s son, Angelo Baldonado, then 16, with the murder, but investigators the following year said that the mother herself pulled the trigger.
In this interrogation footage from the early part of the case, she maintained her innocence.
“No, I didn’t. No,” she said, denying being the killer. “He’s a kid.”
“Between the hours of 1:37 and 2:20, I was gone at the laundromat alone,” Ortiz-Chavez said after police challenged her. She added that her children — “all the boys” — remained at home. “They’re not allowed to leave the home unless they have permission because I need to know where they’re going.”
Jail calls between Baldonado and his mother — included in a probable cause arrest affidavit obtained by Law&Crime — show she was on the verge of coming forward, but Baldonado insisted that she not for the sake of the family.
Prosecutors say Ortiz-Chavez wanted to blame her son because he was a minor and would receive a lesser sentence.
But then her other son, Baldonado’s brother, in March 2023 spoke to a woman on Facebook and said what really happened, according to authorities.
“She advised me that during their conversations (Baldonado’s brother) did advise her that Angelo and his mother, Elizabeth Ortiz-Chavez, had gone to fight Josue and that Josue tried to pull a gun on them and that he got shot before he could take out his gun, but that detectives had charged his brother with the murder,” said the investigating detective’s complaint. “Gilbert also disclosed that the ‘crazy part about it’ was that his brother is not ‘telling’ on his mom.”
In interrogation footage from 2022, the investigator appears incredulous about Ortiz-Chavez’s denials that she wasn’t present for the shooting.
‘People are telling me it’s your car on the scene,” she said, later pressing her with, “I also feel you know more than you’re telling me.”
Ortiz-Chavez pleaded guilty this month to second-degree murder. Sentencing has yet to be scheduled.
Baldonado was sentenced to four years in prison for assault and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.