By Wheeler Cowperthwaite
Special to the SUN

An Española man will spend three years and eight months in prison for a string of armed robberies in November 2024 involving a gun.

District Judge Anastasia Martin sentenced Ernest Rodriguez, 40, on Feb. 24 and entered the sentencing order in the court record on March 3.

Rodriguez pleaded guilty to two counts of armed robbery on Oct. 7, following a spree of successful and unsuccessful,armed robbery attempts, all during Nov. 11, 2024.

Rodriguez’s plea deal set his sentence range of five years of supervised probation to nine years in prison, followed by five years of supervised probation, and left it to the discretion of the judge.

Rodriguez received credit for 470 days spent in jail, which reduced the total amount of time he will spend in prison. He was found a danger to the community and had been sitting in jail following his 2024 arrest.

Rodriguez began his crime spree in the parking lot of the Santa Claran Hotel and Casino, where he tried to rob a woman waiting in the parking lot for a tow truck. Wearing a black hoodie, a white face mask and dirty blue jeans, he demanded she give him all her money. In response, she told him to “get out of here” and he did, getting into a blue SUV and leaving, Española Police Officer Darren Cruz wrote in a criminal complaint dated Nov. 12, 2024.

Then at Dairy Queen, a worker reported a robbery and said a man handed her a brown paper nap-kin and written on it was, “Give me all your money or I’ll shoot you stay quit (sic).” The worker ran from the window, and he drove away. She tried to get his license plate number, but noted the license plate was covered, he wrote.

That afternoon, another woman walked into the Española Police Department to report she went to a walk-up ATM, got out $40 and then a man opened her car door, holding a pistol in his right hand, pointed it at her, and told her to give him all her money, Cruz wrote.

Two more robberies were reported. The first was at Century Bank on Riverside Drive and while officers were there looking for the victim, someone at Wells Fargo reported a robbery. That led to a pursuit involving New Mexico State Police officers, who rammed Rodriguez’s car, stopping it, after Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies popped three of his four tires with a spike strip, he wrote.