The Albuquerque Police Department said two officers surrounded a 35-year-old man outside a vacant Walgreens on Friday evening. When he charged at one of them with a knife, according to police, both officers opened fire.
APD spokesperson Gilbert Gallegos said Robert Salas was pronounced dead at the scene near San Mateo and Central. The incident marked the third time APD shot someone since Sunday — something Chief Cecily Barker acknowledged in a briefing Friday night.
“We recognize that this is the third officer-involved shooting this week; it is the fifth this year,” she said. “We hear the concerns of the community and we are here to tell you what happened this evening.”
Barker said police were called to reports of a person trespassing when they came upon Salas, who ran away. One officer chased Salas, who went behind a pillar outside the shuttered drugstore, as another officer pulled up.
On Saturday, Gallegos gave a play-by-play account of the shooting in a news release, saying Salas had “a large knife” in his hand and one officer armed with a Taser told him to drop it. He said the second officer drew a gun on Salas and repeated commands to drop the weapon when he charged at her.
“Both officers fired their weapons, striking and killing Salas,” Gallegos said.
Court records show Salas had numerous criminal cases since 2009, from southern New Mexico to, more recently, Albuquerque. In 2012 he was sentenced to a short prison stay in a domestic violence case and placed on probation.
Several lesser cases against him were dismissed — one for an officer failing to appear at a hearing — before he was convicted in another domestic violence case in 2019, according to court records. The judge in that case suspended Salas’ three-year prison sentence and placed him on probation, which he violated.
Court records show in August that Salas was arrested for choking his girlfriend and, after pleading guilty, was sentenced to two years in prison. But, like the other case, the judge suspended the sentence and placed Salas on probation.
The suspended sentence was handed down Tuesday.
