A night at Santa Fe's GreenTree Inn

Jun. 13—Nights at the GreenTree Inn are rarely quiet.

During his first stay in the spring of 2020, Noah Armijo awoke to the sound of gunshots in the parking lot nearby.

"I heard a pop-pop-pop," 31-year-old Armijo said, describing the sound of the firearm being discharged just a few hundred feet from his room. "I didn't sleep after that."

On a subsequent stay, he overheard a brutal fight with a man and a woman in the room next door.

"It was someone getting slammed into the wall," said Armijo, who is homeless and who often pools money with friends to pay for a room so they can spend a night off the street. "I've been coming here for two years," he said. "Bad things happen."

Violence at the GreenTree turned deadly in 2021, with the killings of three motel guests in the first six months of the year. In January, Santa Fe police arrested Alvin Crespin on suspicion of murdering 50-year-old Virgil Tortalita of Santo Domingo Pueblo. Tortalita's body was found in a bathtub. The following month, hotel staff found the body of 52-year-old Arthur Loretto slain in a room. And in late May, 59-year-old Marty Little, a hotel guest, was shot in the parking lot. Little died days later.

"I wasn't here those nights," Armijo said. "But it don't surprise me."

The GreenTree Inn opened in the summer of 2019 at the site of a former Motel 6 on Cerrillos Road. The motel is an unassuming two-story complex of three buildings connected by ground-level sidewalks and an elevated wooden walkway connecting the second floors.

The motel was quiet on a recent afternoon, with many guests staying inside their rooms to escape the summer heat. The pool was out of order, but a room was clean and modest, with a slight odor of cigarette smoke.

"This hotel is better than others I have been to," said motel guest Chris Garza, 21, a pitcher for the Pecos League's Stockade professional baseball team, based in Salina, Kan., which was in town to play the Santa Fe Fuego.

Others who have stayed at the GreenTree Inn have been less generous in their praise. Since the motel opened in 2019, many guests have left reviews complaining about safety issues and the presence of violence and drug abuse on the property.

Mia Goodman, whose Google profile says she works at the Nativo Lodge in Albuquerque, stayed at the motel three months ago. "I liked that they did not require a deposit. But the first day we arrived, someone got murdered. [Their] towels are thin and cheap. They are kinda stingy with them too. Room smelled like cigarettes. I could say more but I said enough," she wrote in a review.

Another reviewer named Victoria described a rough night on hotels.com: "Door did not shut fully. Lots of riff raff. Used needles in parking lot. Shooting on property near my room during the day. Scary, unsafe."

A walk around the grounds of the GreenTree Inn provided evidence of some of these issues. On the north side of the building, along the fence line, a used needle and a broken pizzo pipe, often used to smoke methamphetamines, were discarded on the gravel.

One fed-up motel guest taped a piece of yellow paper to the outside of the door. The handwritten note, part threat and part plea, read: "People continue to come to knock on my door. I will get a hold of authorities. Stop coming to my room."

When Jesse Bolt, another player for the Salina Stockade, came into town for a four-game series against the Fuego, he and his teammates were immediately warned about the GreenTree by their opponents.

"We were told by the Fuego guys that there are some sketchy things that go on here," Bolt said. "The hotel hasn't been terrible. It just seems to be the things that go on around the hotel."

The Santa Fe Police Department stationed a surveillance trailer in an adjacent lot in response to the crime and violence at the hotel.

While crime and violence continue to plague the GreenTree Inn, the motel does offer some of the most affordable temporary housing in the city. The weekly rate is $270.

"We're staying here while we look for an apartment," said Leora, a young woman from Santa Domingo Pueblo who has been staying in a room with five other family members for the past two weeks. "Some people have been here for much longer."

Many of the rooms at the GreenTree Inn look like apartments that have been lived in for many months.

Open doors reveal cribs, wall decorations, dishes and, in one room, a portable electric stove that was being used to cook hot dogs. GreenTree only provides microwaves.

Another guest still had Christmas lights strung up, unlit, across one window.

According to Leora, who asked that only her first name be published, the weekly rate is manageable. She works at a nearby pizza place, she said, and each person in the household has a full-time job.

But the stay has not always been easy. "Last night, someone was trying to break into the car," Leora said, describing a man who attempted to open her car doors at 2 or 3 in the morning. She set off the alarm, and he was scared away.

"It was really sketchy," she added.

One woman in Leora's group, who asked that her name not be published, said she and some of the family have been barred entry into Santo Domingo Pueblo for not receiving COVID-19 vaccinations. "We left, and they wouldn't let us back in," said the woman, who now works a night shift stocking groceries at a store in Santa Fe.

"It's been a little rough," she added.

Leora thinks about the recent homicides at the motel — particularly that of Tortalita, who was from her pueblo.

"A relative," she said of Tortalita, as she stood outside the family's motel room.

"The things that happen here don't feel comfortable," said Leora, who hopes to move into a three-bedroom apartment on Airport Road with her family members soon. "But we gotta stick it out."