Staff Reports
A Gallup man has been sentenced to three years in prison following his involvement in a fatal altercation nearly six years ago—a case that bounced through multiple prosecutors and courts before ending in a self-defense plea deal.
On July 2, Gallup District Judge R. David Pederson sentenced 33-year-old Jonathan Wright to three years in the custody of the New Mexico Department of Corrections. Wright pled guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and receiving a stolen firearm. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped a second-degree murder charge.
The sentencing brings closure to a convoluted legal saga that began on Dec. 9, 2020. At around 6 pm, Gallup Police responded to a call of shots fired at the Panda Express located at 508 U.S. Hwy. 491. On the scene, officers found 37-year-old Adam Chee dead from a gunshot wound. Detectives questioned Wright at the scene and initially arrested him solely on the felony firearm charges, as it was unclear at the time whether homicide charges were warranted.
The shooting was later revealed to be rooted in a domestic dispute. According to investigators, Wright was eating a meal inside his car at a nearby gas station, waiting for his girlfriend to finish her shift at the neighboring Golden Corral. The victim, Chee, was the girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend.
Chee reportedly approached Wright’s vehicle brandishing a handgun. Seeing the weapon, Wright drew his own firearm and shot Chee.
The case took years to resolve due to political and administrative shifts within the local justice system. The firearm charges were initially bound over to the Gallup District Court in February 2021. However, in January 2022, then-McKinley County District Attorney Bernadine Martin aggressively upgraded the docket, adding a second-degree murder charge.
Current District Attorney John Berenitz—who briefly handled the case as a line prosecutor before resigning from Martin’s office in June 2021—speculated that Martin refiled the case with the murder charge due to intense pressure from the victim’s family.
Frustrated by a growing backlog of stagnant and dismissed cases under Martin’s administration, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez eventually intervened, stripping Martin of the case and assigning it to the Eleventh District Division II Court. When Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham later appointed Berenitz to replace Martin as the new District Attorney, the New Mexico Department of Justice transferred the case back to McKinley County.
Upon taking office, Berenitz and his team re-evaluated the evidence and determined that a second-degree murder charge could not be sustained in court.
Investigators discovered that while Chee had approached Wright with a handgun, Chee’s weapon was actually unloaded. However, because Wright had no way of knowing the firearm lacked ammunition during the sudden confrontation, his reaction met the standard for justifiable self-defense. Berenitz noted that proving Wright knew the weapon wasn’t loaded would be an impossible burden for the prosecution, calling the original second-degree murder charge an instance of “overcharging” by his predecessor.
Recognizing the incident as a clear self-defense situation, the District Attorney’s office offered Wright a plea deal to drop the homicide charge if he pled guilty to the underlying illegal firearm possession. Wright’s defense attorney accepted the terms, concluding the five-and-a-half-year legal battle.
