A Zuni man has been charged with assault after he reportedly stabbed a man in the throat.

According to the criminal complaint, on Feb. 4,  Joey Luarkie, 23,  was at a woman’s home when her boyfriend knocked on the door. The couple went outside and argued for a short time before the man came back inside to get his stuff.

Luarkie, a member of the Zuni Pueblo, followed the couple into the woman’s bedroom, where a physical altercation allegedly ensued, and the boyfriend was stabbed in the throat.

The victim left the house and collapsed in the front yard, where responding officers from the Zuni Police Department found the woman performing CPR on him. The victim was transported to Zuni...

Featured DWI

Morgan Sterling

Jan. 27, 3:19 pm

Aggravated DWI (Third)

Staff at a Thoreau gas station called and reported a suspected drunk driver, leading to Thoreau man, Morgan Sterling, 48, being arrested and charged with his third DWI.

McKinley County Sheriff’s Deputy Miguel Bittony was dispatched to Shamrock Gas in Thoreau after Metro Dispatch advised of a driver and passenger of a white Ford Expedition appearing intoxicated at the gas pump. Bittony arrived at the scene and found a vehicle matching the caller description about to pull out of the station.

Bittony pulled the vehicle over and conducted a traffic stop. He met the driver, Sterling, and asked for his...

Charges include repeated assault, harassment

A man from Tohatchi is facing 37 months in prison after he allegedly tried to strangle his girlfriend.

According to court records, on Aug. 13, 2022, Anthony Joe, 38, assaulted the victim as she was trying to leave his residence. Joe, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, punched the woman with a closed fist in the back of her head and in her side while she was holding their child, then kicked her in the back and pulled her away from the door by her hair. The victim eventually escaped from the residence without her child and ran to a nearby gas station where she called law enforcement.

When the victim was later interviewed by the FBI...

A man from Mexican Springs, New Mexico, named Timothy Chischilly recently pled guilty to second-degree murder.

Chischilly, 53, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and his co-defendant, Stacey Yellowhorse, were indicted by a federal grand jury on Aug. 11, 2020. According to publicly available court documents, Chischilly and Yellowhorse, his then girlfriend, invited a woman to sleep over at Chilschilly’s house within the exterior boundaries of the Navajo Nation on the night of Jan. 23, 2020.

During the night, Chischilly and Yellowhorse killed the woman by nailing her to the floor, hammering a nail into her head, and bludgeoning her to death. Afterwards, Chischilly and...