NM Attorney General Files Felony Charges Against Landowner Accused of threatening Anglers on the Pecos River
By Ben Neary/NMWF
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has filed felony charges against a San Miguel County landowner accused of threatening anglers on the Pecos River with guns.
Torrez’s office on June 1 announced that landowner Erik Briones faces five counts of aggravated assault. Each count is a fourth-degree felony that could carry a sentence of 18 months upon conviction plus possible additional time for firearm enhancements..
The charges filed in San Miguel Magistrate Court accuse Briones of repeatedly threatening anglers between April 2023 and March 2026. Witness statements allege Briones brandished firearms and threatened that he was going to begin “target practicing,” causing the anglers in the river to believe they were about to be shot.
Briones was booked into the Santa Fe County jail on May 29. He has not yet appeared in court and has not entered a response to the charges. Court records don’t indicate that he has retained an attorney.
The criminal charges against Briones are the latest legal battle between him and the New Mexico Department of Justice over public access to the Pecos River where it crosses his property, upstream from the Village of Pecos.
In May, State District Judge Flora Gallegos granted the AG’s request to find Briones in contempt, finding that he had failed to abide by a 2024 agreement he entered with the state. Under that agreement, he pledged to stop posting signs, fences or other barriers to public access on the river. He also agreed not to threaten members of the public who were boating or recreating there.
Gallegos ordered Briones to remove fencing along the river and ordered him to fill in trenches that a contractor had dug in the riverbed.
The hearing in Gallegos’s on the contempt motion included testimony from Kennis Romero, a Santa Fe resident and flyfishing guide.
“On three separate occasions in the summer of 2023, Mr. Briones threatened me with a shotgun,” Romero testified. He stated that he and a friend left the river as a result of a threat.
Romero is one of four anglers who provided statements to investigators saying that Briones had confronted them on the river. The anglers picked Briones’s photo out of a photo array as the person who had threatened them, according to investigators.
“These allegations involve dangerous and unlawful intimidation directed at New Mexicans who were exercising their legal right to access and recreate in public waters,” said Attorney General Torrez. “No one has the right to threaten violence against members of the public because they disagree with established law. Our office will continue enforcing both the criminal laws of this state and the public access protections guaranteed under New Mexico law.”
At the May court hearing, Briones said he believed the AG’s Office was harassing him for owning property. He said some anglers cross his land to reach a private pond, play loud music on boom boxes early in the morning and allow their dogs to run loose on this property,
Briones said he didn’t know Romero. “If I had to bring out a shotgun, he was provoking me and threatening me,” Briones said.
Under questioning from Mark Baker, a lawyer for the state, Briones testified he didn’t recall threatening anyone with a shotgun. He responded “absolutely,” when Baker asked him if he suffers from memory problems.
“I carry a gun around that property all the time, Mr. Baker,” Briones testified. “It’s my property; I have a right to do that.”
Torrez’s office undertook the original enforcement action against Briones and other landowners on the Pecos following a unanimous 2022 ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court. That decision reaffirmed the longstanding right of New Mexicans to walk or wade on the streambeds of water that flows over privately owned lands for fishing or other recreation. The court also made it clear that the public has no right to trespass over private lands to reach the water.
“We hold that the public has the right to recreate and fish in public waters and that this right includes the privilege to do such acts as are reasonably necessary to effect the enjoyment of such right,” the New Mexico Supreme Court stated in its unanimous opinion.
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruling came in response to a legal challenge brought by the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, the Adobe Whitewater Club and the New Mexico Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. The groups had challenged a regulation adopted by the New Mexico State Game Commission that went into effect in 2017 that purported to allow landowners to close streams over their properties.
The United States Supreme Court in early 2023 declined a request from some New Mexico landowners who had fenced off public waters to reconsider the state court ruling.
After Briones entered the agreement with Torrez’s office in Gallegos’s court, he and other landowners launched another federal court challenge, arguing that the state supreme court ruling amounted to an unconstitutional government taking of their property rights. A federal judge in New Mexico ruled against Briones and the others.
Early this year, a three-judge panel on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the landowners’ appeal. Briones and the other landowners on May 29 petitioned the full 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case.
