Police: Father, son fired 20 shots at home of alleged Bandidos member

Police have accused two men in connection with what investigators say was a weekend shooting incident involving motorcycle gang members that led to a temporary lockdown at the Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center. A complaint that police filed Monday in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court charges David Andrew Cordova, 54, and his son, David Ray Cordova, 29, with shooting at a building and shooting from a vehicle.

Medics took the elder Cordova to the hospital emergency room on Saturday night for treatment of a gunshot wound to one of his arms before he was booked into the Santa Fe County jail. Capt. Robert Vasquez said Sunday that a member of the Vagos Motorcycle Club had been injured by a member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club.

Court records and police reports don’t mention gang names but Vasquez on Monday said that through the course of the investigation officers confirmed the elder Cordova is a Vagos member and a Bandidos member lives in the house the father and son shot at on Saturday.
A police report says the father and son fired more than 20 rounds from a pickup at a house in the 2900 block of Alamosa Drive near Herb Martinez Park. Police say officers who arrived at the scene detained the Cordovas, along with a woman, after the three had come out of the house.

The woman wasn’t arrested or charged with any crime.
Police say the elder Cordova told investigators that he used a .45 caliber gun and his son used a 9 mm handgun in retaliation after the elder Cordova was shot by someone in the house. But the report says he declined to further cooperate with investigators. Police later found bullet casings and blood stains in a pickup the Cordovas were riding in, the report says. Vasquez has said the people who live in the Alamosa Drive house also didn’t want to cooperate with investigators.

No one else has been arrested or charged with a crime in the case.
On Monday, Vasquez said that there is a policeman posted in the neighborhood because of the high tension. He said on Friday, a SWAT team was used to detain a man suspected of attacking someone at a house in the same neighborhood.

Prosecutors have filed motions asking a state district judge to hold the two Cordovas without bond because they are a danger to the community. A judge has not yet ruled on the motions. Court documents say the elder Cordova had a drug-related charge in 2004 but was only convicted of driving a suspended license. A motion filed in his case also says he had been charged in 2000 for another drug-related charge but the disposition of that case wasn’t available.
With regard to the younger Cordova, a motion says that in 2011 he was convicted of a DWI, in 2015 pleaded guilty to a drug-related charge and is the subject of a pending criminal case related to identity theft.

The U.S. Department of Justice says the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, which originated in Texas in the mid-1960s, has at least 2,000 active members in 93 chapters around the country, including New Mexico. Bandidos members were involved in the shootings at a Waco, Texas, restaurant in May 2015 that killed nine people.

The Vagos is a California-based motorcycle gang that started in the 1960s and has several hundred members scattered across 20 chapters in California, Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii and Mexico.


USA - BN.

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