A lawsuit filed Monday in Santa Fe’s First Judicial District Court by two survivors of gunman Ryan Martinez claims that government and law enforcement officials in Rio Arriba County violated their civil rights by failing to protect them from a man who gave off clear warning signs that he was a threat to people around him.

Among those named in the suit are the county sheriff’s department, the late county sheriff Billy Merrifield, an unnamed county undersheriff, three county commissioners and a county manager. None of the county officials named in the lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning. The suit seeks a jury trial and financial compensation in a to-be-determined amount.

The incident that prompted this suit happened on Sept. 28, 2023. During a peaceful demonstration against the proposed installation of a controversial statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate, Martinez shot Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O’odham man from Spokane, Washington, and flashed his handgun at Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman. The plaintiffs allege that their civil rights were violated by county officials and sheriff’s deputies who were aware of the threat posed by Martinez but were seen “leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.”

The statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, was scheduled to be relocated to a courtyard at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors assembled at the complex to celebrate, holding a peaceful Indigenous prayer ceremony.

Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd, and Johns stepped in front of him to block Martinez’s path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a handgun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says.

“There were no sheriff’s deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,” the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque.

Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez’s bullet pierced Johns’ abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent back to his home in Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes — in his pancreas and liver — for six months.

Peixinho was 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground by gunfire and then looked up to see Martinez’s pistol aimed at her head. For months after, she said in an interview, loud noises triggered her. “There were times when I was at work and I’d hear a gunshot,” she said. “I’d crawl into the trunk of my car and I’d be stuck there for hours, so mortified.”

Even though Martinez is behind bars — he was sentenced to four years as part of a plea deal — Johns said that he, Peixinho and their attorney, Santa Fe-based Mariel Nanasi, see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning.

“I would like to see the police do their job,” Johns said in an interview. “I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn’t even the sheriff’s office that apprehended the shooter — it was tribal police.”

Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when people across the U.S. were grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history.

Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate’s statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma.

Reinstalling the statue, Merrifield warned, could likely end with “deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.”

“Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,” he wrote. “By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.”

Johns’ and Peixinho’s cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff’s deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning. “Due to Martinez’s disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,” the lawsuit says. An unnamed undersheriff “then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.” Finally, the lawsuit alleges, the deputies left the scene.

The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day’s potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot.

If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico.

In the years since it was signed into law, a number of prominent cases have been filed under the act — Alec Baldwin alleged violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents in southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial, though. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages.

In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s — said the statue wouldn’t go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo.

When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision.