Inset: Jose Antonio "Adrian" Roman (Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office). Background: The residential street leading to the house where a woman and her son were killed in Santa Fe, N.M. (Google Maps).
A New Mexico man will almost certainly die in prison after shooting and killing his ex-girlfriend and her teenage son with a shotgun in a booze-and-drug-fueled rage after he got dumped.
In April, Jose Antonio "Adrian" Roman, 47, was convicted by a jury of his peers in Santa Fe County on two counts of murder in the first degree over the killing of 46-year-old Carmen Navarette de Gonzales and her 15-year-old son, Axel Gonzales, in November 2023. He was additionally found guilty on related counts of shooting at a dwelling or occupied building and aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon.
On Thursday, 1st Judicial District Court Judge Jason Lidyard sentenced the defendant to two life sentences with the possibility of parole after 60 years. The court also issued an additional 10½-year prison sentence for the shooting and burglary charges.
"This is one of the clearest cases of deliberate murder that has come before me in the eight years that I've been a judge," Lidyard told Roman before delivering the sentence, according to a courtroom report by the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The court, however, assessed every sentence to run consecutively, or one after another, meaning that Roman will have to spend far more than 60 years behind bars before he is eligible for release.
The defense, for its part, reiterated a common theme in an unsuccessful bid for the sentences to run concurrently, or at the same time. Roman's attorney told the judge the convicted killer was so inebriated — on a combination of alcohol and cocaine — his culpability during the shooting was diminished.
But the judge was not having it.
"I don't believe that you were too intoxicated to know what you were doing that night," Lidyard said. "You were able to be in control of yourself well enough to drive all the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe directly to the location of the individual whose life you had already threatened, and then got yourself out of the car with your loaded shotgun, made your way directly to her window and followed through with your threat."
In rejecting that last-ditch plea for leniency, the judge recounted part of the defendant's own theory of the case.
Roman never disputed he was physically responsible for squeezing the trigger on the night in question. Rather, the defendant insisted he was acting without a clear plan and in the heat of the moment when he drove roughly 60 miles and began to shoot out the windows of the residence on Prince of Peace — a street in western Santa Fe.
But prosecutors said there was simply more to it than that.
While Navarette de Gonzales was killed in her bedroom, the gunman then entered the house, went to Axel's room and shot him at point-blank range, according to testimony and evidence at trial.
"You knew everything that was going on that night," the judge told the since-condemned man. "You may have been cloudy because you were intoxicated, but you knew everything that was happening because you did exactly what you planned to do."
Before the killing, the female victim and the defendant had dated for several years. But then Roman hit Navarette de Gonzales.
A restraining order taken out noted the man "became my former partner the moment he hit me and I don't want to see him again."
A temporary restraining order was issued in the domestic violence case just five days before the violence, according to the Santa Fe Reporter. A hearing was scheduled for later that month.
The hearing never happened.
As the days passed after their relationship ended, the man sent more than 100 text messages. The woman never responded.
Incensed by the lack of a reply, Roman stole a shotgun from his own son and drove to the Navarette de Gonzales home just as his ex was putting her children and grandchildren to bed for the night.
The victim's mother traveled from Mexico to see her daughter one last time and "just to say goodbye to her in her coffin," a court translator said, rendering the Spanish into English.
The distraught mother also had a message for her daughter's killer.
"I hope you…who had that bravery to kill them, now stand brave to receive this sentence," the translator continued.