Santa Fe police Tuesday identified 21-year-old Ramon Vigil as the man shot to death just after midnight Sunday in the parking lot of Lowe’s Home Improvement.
Vigil is the city’s third homicide victim of 2023, according to police.
While investigators have not yet named a suspect in the fatal shooting, Capt. Aaron Ortiz said they have “strong leads” and have been working to identify people who were in the store’s parking lot on Zafarano Drive shortly before police responded to the incident around 12:30 a.m. Sunday.
“We are continuing to follow up with all the vehicles that we have seen in surveillance video at the scene,” Ortiz said.
Vigil had planned to meet with a group of people in the Lowe’s parking lot, police said in a news release.
Ortiz said Monday Vigil’s death bears some resemblance to a fatal shooting earlier this year in the parking lot of Home Depot on Richards Avenue. But he provided no further details about the previously unreported incident and did not respond to follow-up questions Monday.
He elaborated on the incident Tuesday, saying police were called to investigate a report of a shooting in the Home Depot parking lot the night of Feb. 15. The incident initially was classified as a case of aggravated battery, he said, but was reclassified as a homicide following the March 1 death of shooting victim Ricardo Chavez-Padilla, 39, who had been receiving medical treatment at University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque.
Investigators have not yet identified any potential suspects in the case, Ortiz said.
Because of some similarities between the home-improvement store shootings that killed Chavez-Padilla and Vigil, police investigated whether there were possible connections but determined the incidents are not related, he added.
“We didn’t find any correlation between the two incidents. It appears to be two totally different groups of people, and right now we don’t believe that they’re related in any way,” Ortiz said.
Still, he said, police have been seeing an increase in criminal activity in and around retail parking lots — Lowe’s in particular — and have bolstered patrols in those areas.
“[Patrol officers have] done as much as they can to try to be there between calls for service to try to disperse or deter any criminal activity from occurring, and unfortunately this tragic incident took place,” Ortiz said, referring to Vigil’s death.
Asked why police did not alert the public about an investigation into the city’s first homicide of the year following Chavez-Padilla’s death, Ortiz indicated the department didn’t see a need to notify the community of the late-night crime.
“We haven’t relied too much on the community because it was in the nighttime hours,” he said. “There wasn’t anybody in the parking lot — from what we can tell — and the group of people that were there, we’ve identified,” Ortiz said. “We’re just working through evidence and through interviews with those people.”
He added, “Unfortunately, this one was a shooting that nobody expected to turn into a death, and unfortunately it did.”
Chavez-Padilla did not disclose much information to investigators prior to his death, Ortiz said, adding police are waiting for results from cellphone data obtained through search warrants to possibly determine a motive in the shooting.
Santa Fe police made an arrest in one homicide in 2023 — the April 8 stabbing of 52-year-old Mario Cucul at an apartment in the 2000 block of Hopewell Street. Marcos Guevara-Calles, 25, is charged with first-degree murder and tampering with evidence in the incident.
He told police he had been staying at Cucul’s apartment and that the two had gotten into a dispute in which the two had struggled over a knife.