News : Free to kill: How, why, Webster\'s shooter was not in jail after felony arrests

Along with Daniel Webster's relatives and friends in Iowa, residents of Albuquerque have been asking since October how a man who pleaded guilty to killing another man in 2001 – and who since his release from prison had already been arrested for several felonies, including robbery, kidnapping and battery – could still remain free to kill a police officer.

Among those feeling the pain the most are the parents of the first man to die at the hands of Davon Cary Lymon.

Shocked and dismayed in September of 2002 at the light sentence handed to down to their son’s killer, the parents of Ronald Chanslor, Jr. were horrified when they found out that the same man who killed their son in 2001 had murdered a policeman.

“My heart is breaking for the officer’s family,” said Dawn Parsons, the mother of Ronald “Ronnie” Chanslor, Jr. “Our justice system is so broken and unless we all step up and do something, we will continue to see these tragic acts of violence.”

Shortly after the news broke on Oct. 21, 2015, that Lymon had been arrested after the shooting of Webster (whose three daughters live in the Vinton area), Ronald Chanslor, Sr.’s phone began ringing in New Mexico. Friends were calling and sending text messages, asking if he had heard the news.

On Sept. 2, 2001, the younger Ronald Chanslor died after being shot by Lymon. Ronnie was 20, and already had a pilot's license, like his father. He grew up, like his father, in the restaurant business, working in the Blake's Lotaburgers chain his grandfather, Blake, had started.

“It brought back painful memories – memories I have lived with every day,” said Chanslor. “Losing a child is the worst thing in the world.”

Friends say Ronnie loved his grandfather, who hoped that one day his grandson would take over the beloved hamburger chain.

Green Chili Burgers

With its familiar logo featured occasionally in the Albuquerque-based TV show “Breaking Bad,” Blake’s Lotaburgers is one of the most popular restaurant chains in New Mexico. Blake Chanslor opened his first restaurant on July 9, 1952, in Albuquerque. Soon the chain grew to include dozens of restaurants throughout the Southwest.

Ronald Chanslor recalls how the chili burger became a popular part of the Blake’s Lotaburgers menu.

Blake and Lotaburgers restaurant employees observed a man regularly come to the restaurant, order a burger, and then take it to the outdoor seating area.

“He would open a small tin foil packet, and put something on his burger,” Chanslor said.

Curiosity got the best of Blake, who went out to ask the man what he was adding to his burger.

The next time that man came in, Blake was ready.

“My dad said, ‘Here, try this,’ and from then on we began serving green chili cheeseburgers,” says Chanslor. The green chili peppers – grown in New Mexico – are peeled, chopped and fried and mixed with special sauces, from mild to hot.

Albuquerque residents were proud to see that National Geographic declared the Blake’s Lotaburgers green chili cheeseburger to be the best green chili cheeseburger in the world in 2006, and declared its burgers to be the 4th best in the world in 2012.

Stolen Lexus

But any dreams that Blake, who was then 82, had of passing his chain to his grandson died on Sept. 2, 2011, at New Mexico University Hospital, not far from the Lotaburgers No. 9 at 9800 Central. The Chanslor family would later sell the restaurant chain – which still retains Blake’s name – in 2003. Blake died in 2009.

Ronnie, says his father, had gotten mixed up with some young men who had been in trouble as juveniles: Davon Lymon, Jullian Quintana, Gabriel Armendariz and others.

"They were doing some things that were not the best," Chanslor says. Police suspect they were involved in some type of auto theft ring. Police reports indicate that Ronnie arrived at the hospital in the back seat of a stolen Lexus.

During a meeting that night, some kind of conflict arose. Lymon and another man emerged from a house and began to beat Ronnie and another man with batons. Ronnie ran to that Lexus, trying to escape the beating he was taking.

"They opened the door and shot him," says his dad. A friend placed Ronnie back in the Lexus and drove him to the hospital; he was pronounced dead a short time later.

Lymon, Quintana and Armendariz were all charged with murdering Chanslor. Quintana and Armendariz pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and conspiracy and received short prison sentences.

Lymon, the gunman – identified in police reports as an 18th Street Gang member nicknamed “Tigger” or “Tiger” – still faced a murder rap.

‘Heartsick feeling’

But through a variety of proceedings, says Chanslor, there was a change in prosecutor, because of a conflict of interest. By August of 2002, Lymon’s attorney had avoided a murder trial for his client by securing a plea on a voluntary manslaughter charge. Sentencing was set for a Friday the following month.

Chanslor recalls how, that at around 9 a.m. that day, he was getting ready to go to the sentencing hearing (scheduled for 10) when his phone rang.

“It was Ronnie’s mom,” he recalls. A judge had issued the sentence before hearing from Ronnie’s parents. Lymon was sentenced to a decade in prison, much less than Ronnie’s parents believed he deserved.

“The whole thing happened without any input from us,” said Chanslor.

Ronnie’s mom, Dawn Parsons, heard the news of the light prison term and feared the worst.

“After Lymon’s sentencing in 2001, I had a heartsick feeling with the way our justice system is set up – that another family would have to go through this type of senseless tragedy,” she said.

Shortly after the three suspects returned to the streets, their crimes again made headlines; journalists investigating those later stories recalled the perpetrators’ participation in the 2001 murder of Chanslor, and again mentioned the hamburger chain.

Armendariz was imprisoned, released and found himself back in jail, even before the Chanslor/Lymon case was over. In 2002, he was arrested for burglary. He has been arrested for several more felony and drug-related charges over past decade. In 2013, he was arrested for drug trafficking, after he was arrested when officers conducting a search warrant found drugs, including heroin hidden inside an Arizona Tea can. This followed his 2012 arrest, when a friend borrowed his car and then committed a murder.

Quintana was also a repeat offender, with multiple drug and domestic abuse arrests. His most notorious recent crime was on Halloween of 2013, when he was arrested for domestic abuse and for trying to run over police officers as they attempted to arrest him.

Lymon, who fired the shots that killed Chanslor, spent the next 10 years in prison. He was featured on a reality TV show, where he spoke on camera about explaining to his young children why he had to go to prison.

But not long after Lymon’s release from prison, he ended up back in jail after the first of many felony arrests.

On Sept. 28, 2012, he was arrested for robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery in Espanola, a city of about 10,000, located 90 miles northeast Albuquerque. He and another man were accused of using force or the threat of force to steal keys and $150 from a man named Abraham.

Yet, less than a month later, the case was dismissed.

10 day rule

Lymon found – to his great legal advantage – that the system had changed since his last arrest 11 years earlier. He soon discovered how the rules – “the way the justice system was set up,” in the words of his first victim’s mother – were more favorable for felony suspects.

The population of the Bernalillo County prison, called the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), had nearly doubled while Lymon was in state prison, from around 1,400, to a peak of nearly 3,000. Its official capacity is 2,236. (The prison population at MDC represents .4 percent of Bernalillo county's population; if .4 percent of Benton County residents were in jail, the population at the Benton County facility would be more than 100; its current average is 16.)

The overcrowding of the MDC, along with a corresponding caseload that clogged the system, led the New Mexico Supreme Court to implement new rules designed to speed up the process.

Called a “special pilot rule governing time limits for criminal proceedings in the Second Judicial District Courts,” the new policy gives prosecutors a 10-day limit to prepare their trial information and present it to a defendant’s defense team.

That ruling made a few headlines in news stories, editorials and television newscasts when it went into effect; it made many more headlines after the fatal shootings of Webster in Albuquerque in October and Gregg Brenner in nearby Rio Rancho in May of this year.

Alburque Police Chief Gordon E. Eden, Jr., wrote an 8-page letter to the New Mexico Supreme Court, pleading for a change in that policy, citing “potentially dangerous consequences.” He went on to tell the New Mexico Justices that the rule could mean that Lymon – as well as Andrew Romero, who is accused of killing Officer Gregg Brenner – could end up being released from jail because of authorities’ inability to process complex evidence and witness statements by the new, strict court-mandated deadlines. (Both suspects are being held on federal charges, although neither has been charged in state court for murder; the new rules do not apply to federal court cases).

Bernalillo County District Attorney Katie Brandenburg – whose office approved the manslaughter deals for Lymon and Romero – also publicly addressed her concerns about the new rules.

Chief Eden has recent history on his side when he discusses the possibility of releasing Lymon despite his felony arrests; twice in the past year, Lymon has been arrested for felonies; both times, as in the 2012 robbery/conspiracy case, charges were dropped, because of the new court rules.

Aggravated battery

Less than a year ago, Albuquerque Police Office Andrew Jaramillo sat at his desk, looking at a video of Damon Lymon after a fight outside the Knockouts strip club on Central Avenue.

"Davon began to punch and knee a male who fell to the ground," wrote the police officer in the battery complaint filed on Dec. 16, 2014. "As the male subject was on the ground Davon continued to punch him, causing him to lose consciousness. Davon then walks away from the male and yelled out '18th Street' as he was celebrating. The male subject was left in the street unconscious..."

Although Lymon was charged with four felonies in connection with this case (two counts of battery, one count of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy), all four charges were eventually dismissed within two months of his indictment.

First felony gun possession arrest

Six months later, ABQ PD detective Leland Sweitzer, who was investigating the theft of a .45 caliber handgun, read a text message from Lymon, in which he wrote to the gun’s owner, "I was going to give you back your gun. Now I am going to throw it away."

As a felon previously convicted of manslaughter, Lymon was committing yet another felon by possessing that handgun. On May 30, 2015, he was charged with felony possession of a firearm and embezzlement. Both of those charges were dismissed on July 24, 2015. The 10-day rule was also a factor in that case.

Morale problems in APD

In addition to the prison overcrowding and the restrictive court rules, the criminal justice system into which Davon Lymon returned included many complications that cramped or at times even crippled the “Long Arm of the Law.”

A survey by the Albuquerque Police Officers Association in 2012 – the year of Lymon’s release – indicated that 99 percent of the 900 APD officers at that time believed that morale was low.

From 2010 through 2015 there were more than 40 police shootings in Albuquerque. While the majority of them were ruled “justified,” several resulted in lawsuits. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the department, issuing a report that said that the majority of the 20 fatalities at the hands of the APD were “unconstitutional.”

The 46-page report contained several rebukes and calls for change, including this observation:

“Albuquerque police officers often use deadly force in circumstances where there is no imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to officers or others. Instead, officers used deadly force against people who posed a minimal threat, including individuals who posed a threat only to themselves.”

One of the more recent lawsuits alleging this misuse of force came from one of the APD’s own members. On Jan. 9, 2015, undercover drug officer Jacob Grant was in the back of a sedan with a fellow officer and two drug suspects when his own lieutenant, Greg Brachle, shot him nine times.

Grant’s lawsuit claims he lost 80 percent of his blood and continues to suffer from a variety of serious injuries that impact his daily life. Among the other things his lawsuit demands is to require the city and APD to “disavow and act to remove the culture, pattern, practice or custom of use of unnecessary and excessive use of force, improper seizures and aggression.”

In another separate incident, the war on drugs and gangs suffered a major setback when a drug suspect turned DEA informant, Edward Quintana, murdered a man. Quinta pleaded guilty in September to murder and molestation. He had been arrested in February of 2014 after he was accused of sexually abusing a young boy, and then murdering the boy’s father, Jason Estrada, in front of the boy after Estrada confronted Quintana about the abuse. Estrada’s family has filed a $50 million lawsuit against the DEA.

“We commit to the safety and well -being of the people of New Mexico by doing the right thing, always.”

That’s the motto of the New Mexico Department of Corrections – a motto that many of the people mentioned above say the state has failed to live up to in the Lymon case.

Despite the felonies that Lymon and Romero committed after their release from prison, court rules and the plea agreements they made after being charged with murder kept them on the streets.

The New Mexico Corrections Department clearly defines parole as a “legal requirement, ordered by the judge at an offender's sentencing, and follows a term of incarceration in the Department of Corrections. Typically, offenders reaching the end of a prison term will appear before a panel of 2-3 parole board members to have conditions of parole set. Once released from prison, the offender is monitored by a Parole Officer from the Department of Corrections. Parole is usually for a statutory period of 1 or 2 years, although there are exceptions. During that time, the offender must comply with the conditions set. If conditions are not followed, the board will take the action required and, if necessary, return the offender to prison for the remainder of the parole term.”

That did not happen in Lymon’s release, or Romero’s. Both committed felonies after being released from prison. Both were back on the streets, with no mechanism in place to return the felons to prison.

On July 24, 2015 after the third felony charge against Davon Lymon was dismissed, the convicted killer and long-time gang member was free, living his life as what the FBI would soon call “a career criminal – the Worst of the Worst.”

Fifty-eight evenings later, Lymon, according to federal court documents filed after the murder of Officer Daniel Webster, went to the parking lot of a 7-Eleven convenience store on 4th Street just north of Albuquerque’s Central Avenue. There, he helped his passenger, a 17-year-old female, obtain some heroin. The pair proceeded to ride east on Central, past the club where Lymon was videotaped beating and kicking a man in December of 2014. They rolled past the University of New Mexico Hospital where Ronald Chanslor, Jr, had been pronounced dead 14 years earlier. They rode past Yale Boulevard, which leads to the Lead Street apartment where Lymon had shot Chanslor twice. Still further eastward they went, past the Blake’s Lotaburgers No. 9. Somewhere along the way, Lymon noticed a police cruiser with its lights on behind him, with an Iraq veteran and well-respected officer alone at the wheel.

The felon, prohibited by law from possessing firearms, felt under his clothing a hidden Taurus .40 caliber handgun, described by its maker as a “dynamic semi-auto that gives nothing away under the lightest T-shirts or polos with its remarkably lean, lightweight design — but still steps up with big firepower.”

He pulled the motorcycle with stolen license plates into the Walgreen’s parking lot near the intersection of Central and Eubank, and turned back to warn his passenger to stay calm.

“I am about to do something I regret,” he said.

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