Watch a New Mexico Sheriff’s Deputy Jovially Hurl a Baby Rabbit to Its Death As His Supervisors Laugh
My friend Willow likes to kill baby rabbits. So does Alejandro Gomez. One important difference is that Willow, who also likes to eat baby rabbits, is half Border Collie and half Australian Shepherd, while Gomez is a human employed as a sheriff’s deputy in Grant County, New Mexico.
A recently revealed cellphone video shows Gomez demanding that another deputy, Marcus Salas, let him hold a baby rabbit that Salas found in the middle of a dirt road while working a night shift near Hachita, New Mexico, last August along with Gomez, Sgt. Brandon Reese, and Cpl. Cesar Torres. Gomez is persistent and at one point threatens Salas with a taser. Salas does not want to hand over the rabbit because he is worried that Gomez will kill it, which is precisely what Gomez does by hurling it against a patrol vehicle after Salas, trying to de-escalate the situation, finally gives in under pressure from Reese and Torres as well as Gomez. The two supervisors, who can be heard laughing hard in the video, evidently thought the whole thing was hilarious.
That disturbing incident is part of a criminal complaint against Gomez that includes one charge of extreme cruelty to animals and four charges of aggravated assault on a police officer—i.e., Salas, who says he was repeatedly harassed by Gomez, including incidents in which Gomez drew his taser and his gun. New Mexico State Police Agent Justin Blacklock, who investigated Salas’ complaints after an internal review seemed to go nowhere, filed those charges on February 14. But like the video, which Blacklock says Reese recorded, the charges came to light only recently.
On the face of it, Gomez’s alleged gunplay, which involves a human victim, is more alarming than his vicious treatment of the baby rabbit. But combined, the allegations make you wonder what sort of people Grant County is trusting with guns and badges. It is especially worrisome that two supervisors not only saw nothing wrong with the behavior that one of them jovially documented but actually egged on Gomez as he sought to torment Salas with the sort of casual cruelty that is usually seen as a marker of dangerously antisocial tendencies.
Salas says the rabbit incident was part of a pattern that began early in the morning on August 5, 2024. According to an arrest affidavit that Blacklock filed along with the criminal complaint, Salas was working on his computer at the Grant County Sheriff’s Office in Silver City when he took out his cellphone to text a relative. “Deputy Gomez came up from behind Deputy Salas and snatched the unlocked cell phone,” says the affidavit, which summarizes the account that Sa
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