A 21-year-old shot his stepmother as she went in to hug him at his charter school graduation ceremony, New Mexico police say.
Cristian Bencomo was booked into jail on Wednesday, May 8, accused of shooting his stepmother, the Albuquerque Police Department said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The investigation revealed that Bencomo’s stepmother “started to hug him,” and he pulled out a “handgun and shot her in the neck,” police said.
“We made it all the way through graduation – it was really lovely until it wasn’t,” Mary Ward, a witness, told KOB 4 Eyewitness News.
With more than 100 people in attendance at the charter school graduation, Gallegos said “there was a lot of … chaos at the time.”
Nonetheless, police said “bystanders held (Bencomo) until officers arrived.”
The woman was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries, according to Gallegos. She underwent “hours of surgery,” according to the organizers of a GoFundMe, who said she will need continued medical treatment and rehab.
Angel Chester, the woman’s sister, was close by when the shooting happened, KRQE News reported. Chester told the station she witnessed Bencomo stomp on her sister’s head following the shooting.
“I keep thinking that it’s a bad dream that I’ll wake up from,” Chester told the outlet.