Albuquerque woman gets seven years for Coronado Center retail theft

Marileysi Campos is headed to prison for seven years after a Sephora theft at Coronado Center grew into a felony organized retail crime case. Campos, Yarelis Cespedes and a 16-year-old went into the store in 2023 and stole thousands of dollars in makeup, a case that prosecutors treated as more than a simple mall theft.

Campos later pleaded guilty to organized retail crime in 2024 and learned her sentence on Thursday. The outcome shows how New Mexico’s 2023 organized retail crime law is changing the way prosecutors handle theft cases, especially when investigators can tie together repeated conduct, multiple participants and merchandise worth far more than a one-time shoplifting haul. The law allows charges based on aggregated retail market value over time, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the measure was aimed at offenders funding organized crime through retail theft. She cited a 2021 Retail Industry Leaders Association estimate that stolen sales cost New Mexico $819.8 million.

The case also points directly to Coronado Center’s role in Albuquerque’s retail economy. The mall sits at 6600 Menaul Blvd. N.E. in northeast Albuquerque and describes itself as a two-level enclosed center with more than 1 million square feet of retail space and more than 130 retailers. Coronado Center also calls itself the most-visited shopping center in New Mexico, which helps explain why theft cases there draw close attention from store operators, mall security and law enforcement.

That attention has been building for months. In September 2024, the New Mexico Department of Justice’s Organized Retail Crime Unit said it visited more than 100 retailers during an outreach operation at Coronado Center and recovered more than $800 worth of merchandise. Separate reporting in May 2024 said law enforcement and retailers were leaning more heavily on shared data platforms to connect repeat offenders and the fences who resell stolen goods, a sign that the response to retail theft is becoming more coordinated.

Another Bernalillo County case showed the same pattern at a larger scale. Prosecutors said a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office investigation found repeated thefts from Sephora, Ulta, Target and Lululemon that exceeded $10,000 per store. Against that backdrop, Campos’s seven-year sentence looks less like an isolated punishment than part of a broader local push to deter theft that appears planned, organized and profitable. KRQE also reported that Cespedes had previously been convicted in an unrelated case involving the recording and posting of a video of a 13-year-old being sexually assaulted, and later received a three-year sentence that ran concurrently with another sentence.