Grand Junction firefighters and paramedics quickly put the bleeding, pregnant woman into an ambulance with the help of police officer Colin Daugherty.
Daugherty shut the doors of the ambulance and stepped back, waiting for it to speed away as it typically does.
Nothing happened. The ambulance remained.
Daugherty, 29, who has been on the Grand Junction police force for about 18 months, reopened the doors and looked inside.
“They were all intense just working on her,” Daugherty recalled of the paramedics trying to save the woman and her fetus. “I ended up jumping in the ambulance and drove to the hospital while they kept working in the back.”
Firefighters and police officers race to hundreds, sometimes thousands of calls, over the course of their careers.
Finding an unconscious, pregnant woman lying in the street Sunday night tested their mettle.
“It ranks right up there with the toughest calls we have ever been on,” said paramedic Ethan Cloutier, 35, a seven-year veteran of the Grand Junction Fire Department. “It was definitely a different situation.”
Anna Marie Macias, 23, was shot in the neck Sunday night by Lonnie Ray Herrera, 39, according to court documents.
Macias was gunned down in front of two of her children, according to an arrest affidavit, and then dragged by a van as Herrera fled the the scene.
On Feb. 19, police were called to the couple’s home on a domestic-violence complaint. Police found that Macias had a red welt on the corner of her left eye, swelling above her right eye and a bleeding cut on the top of her head, according to an affidavit in a pending assault case.
Macias told police she had gotten into an argument with Herrera, who had been drinking rum, and he attacked her from behind, punching her with a closed fist when she tried to leave the home, the assault affidavit said.
When police arrived at the home, Herrera had already left. Police contacted Herrera by phone, but he hung up on the officer, the affidavit said.
On Sunday, Herrera drove Macias and her two children, a 9-year-old and a 4-year-old, to a remote area and fired shots into the air, the murder affidavit said.
He later drove back to Grand Junction, dropping Macias and the two kids off near 26th Street and Belford Avenue, where he shot Macias in the neck, the affidavit said.
Macias’ third-trimester fetus was delivered at St. Mary’s Hospital by cesarean section. The baby possibly suffered “brain damage due to complications resulting from Anna’s injuries,” according to court documents. “Doctors told the family they were unsure if the baby would survive.”
Officials in Grand Junction released no information today on the newborn.
“It is just one of these things. It’s tragic,” said Kevin Kuhlman, 36, a paramedic who answered the call.
Herrera is being held in lieu of $2 million bail.
The Department of Corrections became involved in the investigation today.
Herrera had been on parole since being released from prison in October on a felony-menacing conviction in September 2005.
His parole had not been violated when a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department after Macias reported he had attacked her on Feb. 19. Macias was then arrested on the domestic-violence warrant in the case on March 17 by the Delta County Sheriff’s Department but later released.
Alison Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said the agency was working with local law enforcement today on the “chain of events” around the warrant, Herrera’s arrest and his parole status.
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com
