By Rep. Nicole Chavez, R-Albuquerque | New Mexico House District 31

If you’re not from Albuquerque, you may not know my story. If you’ve been watching what’s happened in Las Cruces, the loss of Chris Carnero, the tragedy at Young Park, you may feel like those things are happening in isolation, like the violence that took your neighbors and your children is something unique to your community, something you’re enduring alone. I want you to know that couldn’t be further from the truth. What you’re living right now is what I have been living for close to 11 years.

On the night of June 26, 2015, my son Jaydon was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting while at a house party in northeast Albuquerque. He was 17 years old and had just been accepted to the Air Force Academy. He was kind and bright and full of a future that was stolen from him in an instant by a senseless act of violence. In the days and weeks that followed, I learned something painful about the system I had trusted to deliver justice: it wasn’t built for people like Jaydon. It wasn’t built for people like us.

Jaydon’s killer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but that sentence was reduced to 20 years when the state legislature passed the Second Chance bill in 2023, which took juveniles sentenced to life down to 15-25 years. Two other individuals involved in that same shooting pleaded guilty to lesser charges; one walked out of prison in six years; his sentence was supposed to be 16 and the other; a juvenile who was the driver and a shooter only served one year in a juvenile detention center.

I have lived with that math ever since. I sat with that reality, and I made a decision. I could not bring Jaydon back, but I could refuse to let what happened to him happen to another family without a fight. I went to the Legislature in 2016 as an advocate, a mother carrying a photograph of her son and a conviction that things had to change. What I found there disappointed me, but it also ignited something in me in the best possible way: I learned that if I wanted a seat at the table, I was going to have to earn one.

It took eight years. Two campaigns. On January 1, 2025, I was sworn in as a state representative for New Mexico House District 31, the first Hispanic woman to hold that seat. I arrived with 22 bills ready to file, most of them focused on public safety and victims’ rights. I arrived thinking that, finally, things would move.

They have moved some. But not enough. And that brings me to why I’m writing to you today.

When I heard about Chris Carnero, I didn’t just feel grief. I felt the particular, gutting recognition of a mother who has been there. Janel Carnero said something publicly that has stayed with me. She said that children are being groomed and used to commit crimes by people who know the sentences are minimal, that our children are being used as weapons because the system makes it cheap to do so. She is right; she shouldn’t have had to bury her son to say it.

New Mexico’s Children’s Code, as it stands, allows a young person to commit violent offense after violent offense without triggering meaningful accountability, not until someone is dead. The data from Las Cruces Police makes the trend impossible to ignore in 2018, 18 juveniles were arrested in possession of a firearm. By 2025, that number had climbed to 58. In the eight years from 2012 to 2019, not a single juvenile in Las Cruces was charged with murder. Since 2020, 18 have been.

Las Cruces, you are not alone in this. Demand reform of the Children’s Code. Show up. Write your legislators. Bring your grief and your anger and your love for the children you’ve lost and the children you’re still fighting to protect. That is how this changes, not because lawmakers finally find the courage on their own, but because the people of New Mexico give them no other choice.

The next family shouldn’t have to wait 11 years to be heard.

State Rep. Nicole Chavez, R-Albuquerque, represents House District 31.