A Routine Trespassing Call Became Las Cruces Police Department's Darkest Day

He Expected a Conversation, Not an Attack

At around 5 p.m. on February 11, 2024, Las Cruces Police Officer Jonah Hernandez arrived at a property on South Valley Drive for what sounded like an ordinary call.

Someone was reportedly trespassing.

There was no pursuit leading officers across the city. No armed standoff had been declared. No dispatcher was warning Hernandez that he was about to walk into an immediate attack.

The surveillance footage shows Hernandez parking his cruiser and approaching a man sitting beneath a covered area toward the rear of the property.

The man was 29-year-old Armando Silva.

Within moments, everything changed.

As Hernandez approached and attempted to speak with him, Silva got up and moved toward the officer. Video released later by the Las Cruces Police Department shows Silva producing a large knife. Hernandez immediately tried to move away.

He did not have enough time.

Silva chased him.

Hernandez fell.

The attack that followed was so disturbing that Police Chief Jeremy Story later described the recording as the worst video he had ever watched.

But then something happened that neither man could have anticipated.

A civilian witnessed the attack.

He was armed.

And instead of leaving, he intervened.

Three gunshots were heard.

Silva fell.

The armed citizen then turned his attention away from the attacker and toward the critically injured officer.

What began as an ordinary trespassing call had ended with two men mortally wounded, a civilian desperately attempting to save a police officer and a department about to experience the first line-of-duty death in its history.

 A Call to South Valley Drive

Officer Jonah Hernandez was 35 years old.

He had served with the Las Cruces Police Department for approximately two years and had previously lived in El Paso, Texas. He was married and the father of two sons.

On February 11, Hernandez was dispatched to the 300 block of South Valley Drive after police received a complaint about a man trespassing.

Reporting by the Las Cruces Sun-News identified the location more specifically as 355 South Valley Drive near Amador Avenue.

The 911 call sounded almost mundane compared with what followed.

A woman asked whether an officer nearby could confront the man and see if that would resolve the situation.

That detail is important.

Nothing about the request communicated the scale of danger Hernandez was about to face.

He arrived alone.

Surveillance footage later released by LCPD captured his cruiser entering the property while Silva remained beneath a covered structure toward the back.

Hernandez stepped out.

He walked toward Silva.

The officer's body-worn camera recorded the same encounter from a completely different perspective.

That combination of surveillance footage and bodycam later allowed investigators and the public to reconstruct the sequence with unusual clarity.

Real news photograph from KFOX14 showing the Las Cruces community gathering at a candlelight vigil for Officer Jonah Hernandez.

The opening moments contain no prolonged argument.

There is no extended confrontation.

Instead, according to the released footage and police account, the attack develops extremely quickly.

Hernandez asks questions related to the trespassing call.

Silva rises.

Then he approaches.

The knife becomes visible.

Hernandez realizes the danger and tries to retreat.

Seconds later, the routine call has become a fight for his life.

Seconds Changed Everything

The attack is difficult to describe without turning a tragedy into spectacle.

The essential sequence is enough.

Police said Silva lunged at Hernandez and attacked him repeatedly with the knife after the officer fell.

The bodycam perspective becomes chaotic.

The surveillance camera, positioned farther away, captures the broader movements.

Hernandez attempts to get back up but is critically wounded.

Then another person enters the story.

His name was Issiah Astorga.

Astorga, also 29, witnessed what was happening.

According to the account he later provided investigators, he initially attempted to intervene physically. He saw that Hernandez was bleeding severely and became concerned not only for the officer but for his girlfriend and himself.

Astorga was armed.

He fired.

Three gunshots can be heard on the recording.

Silva was struck and died at the scene.

But Astorga's actions did not stop once the threat was down.

He moved toward Hernandez.

The footage captures him trying to help the injured officer.

Another civilian became involved as well.

One of the bystanders used Hernandez's police radio to alert dispatchers to what had happened.

That detail became one of the defining elements of the case.

The responding officer was incapacitated.

There was no ordinary radio update coming from him.

Instead, a civilian had to pick up the officer's equipment and summon the department to its own emergency.

Other witnesses join the effort

More people soon realized something was terribly wrong.

One witness later told KVIA that he had been driving nearby when he heard gunshots.

He stopped.

When he approached, he saw two people on the ground.

One was Silva.

The other was Officer Hernandez.

The witness described the scene as almost impossible to process.

The civilians attempted to help Hernandez while waiting for emergency personnel.

Their actions provide an important counterpoint to the violence that dominates the opening of the footage.

For several seconds, the video documents an attack.

Afterward, it becomes a record of strangers attempting to save someone they had never expected to encounter that afternoon.

Hernandez was eventually transported to MountainView Regional Medical Center.

Doctors could not save him.

He died from his injuries.

Silva was pronounced dead at the scene.

Who was Armando Silva?

In the days following the attack, investigators began reconstructing Silva's history.

Police Chief Jeremy Story said Silva had an extensive criminal record that included violent offenses.

Associated Press reporting described him as having a history of violent crime and mental illness. Police said he had misdemeanor and felony convictions and had previously violated parole.

That history immediately generated difficult questions.

Could anything have prevented the encounter?

Was there information Hernandez could reasonably have known before approaching Silva?

Were broader failures in the criminal justice or behavioral-health systems relevant?

Those questions became part of the discussion in Las Cruces after Hernandez's death.

But they should not obscure what the footage establishes about the officer's actions.

Chief Story was emphatic when LCPD released the video.

He said Hernandez had done nothing wrong and that the same attack could have happened to virtually any officer responding to such a call.

That point explains why the footage affected the department so deeply.

There was no obvious sequence of poor decisions by Hernandez that viewers could point to and say, “That was the mistake.”

He responded to a call.

He approached the person he had been sent to investigate.

And the situation exploded within seconds.

The armed civilian becomes part of the investigation

Astorga's intervention naturally created another legal question.

A civilian had deliberately shot and killed someone.

Police therefore had to investigate the shooting separately from the attack on Hernandez.

Investigators presented the case to the Third Judicial District Attorney's Office on February 27.

Two days later, police publicly identified Astorga.

Prosecutors ultimately decided not to pursue charges against him for Silva's death.

That decision is significant because the footage and witness accounts provided investigators with unusually direct evidence of what Astorga had confronted.

He did not arrive after the attack and make assumptions about what had happened.

He witnessed it.

According to police, he saw Silva attacking Hernandez and intervened.

Once Silva was down, Astorga's focus shifted toward helping the officer rather than continuing the confrontation.

The sequence captured on video provided crucial context for evaluating his actions.

The footage itself became controversial

The story did not end with the investigation.

Las Cruces Police also faced a difficult decision over releasing the video.

Bodycam footage can provide transparency, but footage depicting the death of an officer presents an entirely different problem.

Chief Story openly expressed how disturbing he found the recordings.

Before showing them publicly, he warned that the footage was exceptionally difficult to watch. He said he would not have released it if public-records requirements had not compelled the department to do so.

The department ultimately released both Hernandez's body-camera recording and surveillance footage on March 1.

The two angles provide different information.

The fixed surveillance camera shows the overall movement: Hernandez approaching, Silva moving toward him, the attempted retreat and the intervention by Astorga.

The bodycam provides the officer's perspective.

Together they demonstrate how quickly an apparently ordinary call became unrecoverable.

The footage also explains why a video lasting seconds affected an entire department for months afterward.

These were not anonymous figures on a screen to Hernandez's colleagues.

They were watching one of their own.

Las Cruces Loses an Officer for the First Time

Jonah Hernandez's death represented a grim milestone.

To the department's knowledge, he became the first Las Cruces Police Department officer killed in the line of duty in its approximately 96-year history.

For his family, however, the historical significance was secondary.

They had lost a husband, father, son and brother.

Hernandez left behind his wife and two sons.

In the days after his death, his body was escorted back to his hometown of El Paso.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered state flags lowered to half-staff in his honor.

The Las Cruces community gathered for a candlelight vigil.

Then, on February 21, hundreds of officers and community members gathered for his funeral.

Law-enforcement personnel traveled from Las Cruces, El Paso and agencies as far away as New York, Chicago and Arizona to pay their respects.

Real KFOX14 news photograph from Officer Jonah Hernandez's memorial service.

His wife, Yesenia, spoke publicly about their life together.

She described more than 11 years shared with her best friend and remembered Hernandez as a devoted father whose children would never have to question whether their dad loved them.

Those words put the bodycam footage into its proper perspective.

Online, the incident can easily become another shocking police video.

A title can reduce it to three dramatic facts:

An officer was attacked.

A civilian intervened.

The suspect was shot.

But the actual story extends far beyond those seconds.

Hernandez went to work that Sunday.

He had attended church before beginning his shift.

He responded to what sounded like a routine trespassing complaint.

Hours later, his family was confronting a future without him.

Astorga also entered the situation expecting none of what followed.

Within seconds, a civilian became an eyewitness to a fatal attack, made the decision to intervene with a firearm and then attempted to help save the wounded officer.

Investigators later concluded that he should not face criminal charges for shooting Silva.

And for the Las Cruces Police Department, the call forced a painful examination of officer safety, criminal justice policy and the unpredictable nature of seemingly routine service calls.

A trespassing complaint rarely sounds like the most dangerous assignment of a shift.

On February 11, 2024, it became exactly that.

The Full Story Is Bigger Than the Graphic Footage

The most important part of this incident is not the violence captured by Officer Hernandez's body camera. It is how little warning preceded it and what happened immediately afterward.

A routine call became a fatal attack within seconds. A civilian witnessed what was happening and intervened. Other strangers then joined the effort to help Hernandez, while one used the fallen officer's own radio to summon assistance. Police, prosecutors and the community were left to reconstruct an encounter that permanently changed the Las Cruces Police Department.

Officer Jonah Hernandez was laid to rest on February 21, 2024, at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Cemetery in El Paso, but Las Cruces continues to commemorate his service