Albuquerque Father Charged After Son Brings Loaded Gun to Elementary School

An Albuquerque father is facing a felony charge after his 9-year-old son carried a loaded, credit-card-shaped pistol into Mitchell Elementary School on February 27 and showed it to three classmates.

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman charged Robert Encinio, 42, with negligently making a firearm accessible to a minor under Bennie's Law, a New Mexico statute named for Bennie Hargrove, a 13-year-old Albuquerque middle school student shot and killed in 2021 by a classmate who used his father's improperly stored gun. The charge is a fourth-degree felony. A criminal complaint was filed March 12 in Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court.

According to the complaint, Encinio's son took the gun and three bullets from his father's unlocked desk drawer the evening before the incident while Encinio was home. The desk drawer had no lock, and the gun itself had no lock. The child kept the weapon in his bedroom overnight before bringing it to the school, located near Eubank and Comanche NE, the following morning.

The gun was a foldable .22 caliber pistol engineered to resemble a credit card, making it easy to conceal. At school, three students alerted staff after the boy showed them the weapon. Albuquerque Public Schools Police Department officers responded and seized it.

The criminal complaint paints a broader picture of the firearms environment inside Encinio's home office. The 9-year-old told authorities his father kept approximately 44 different firearms there, some loaded with rounds in the magazines and stored without locks. Court documents indicate the office was equipped with a timed keypad lock and metal bars on the doors, but those security measures were rendered moot the night of the alleged incident because the door was left open.

Bregman also filed an extreme risk firearm protection order, a civil action that prohibits the possession or purchase of firearms. "We file them to get the court to intervene and to deal with the whole gun issue in a particular household," Bregman said. On the underlying criminal charge, he noted that only a few similar cases have been prosecuted statewide since 2023 and described them as difficult to prove. He was blunt about the core issue: "People need to make sure their guns are stored safely, whether it's a gun lock on it or in a gun safe."

In a letter to parents dated February 27, Mitchell Elementary Principal Kristina Yar confirmed that students had alerted staff about the weapon and that APS Police had responded and seized the gun. Yar stated the student had not expressed any intentions of harming himself or others, though the school is pursuing disciplinary measures against him "up to and including expulsion." She urged parents to keep firearms out of children's reach. "The consequences of failing to do so could be devastating," she wrote.

Encinio declined to comment when approached at his home.

Bennie's Law was designed precisely to hold adults accountable when inadequate gun storage gives children access to loaded weapons. The charge against Encinio will test how that accountability holds up in court; Bregman's own office has seen only a handful of similar prosecutions in the three years since the law took effect.