Seventeen-year-old Javon Fielder pleaded guilty on Friday to eight felony counts—including aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon, breaking, and larceny of firearms—just an hour before jury selection was set to begin in Third Judicial District Court. The charges stem from a November 2025 break-in at Stryker's Shooting World in Las Cruces, a case that investigators say they cracked thanks to a forgotten class schedule left inside a getaway car.
According to Organ Mountain News, prosecutors said that during the raid at approximately 2:00 a.m. on November 22, 2025, six masked teenagers spent roughly five minutes inside the gun store, with Fielder armed with an axe, before fleeing in a second stolen vehicle, a gray Kia Rio. As reported by KDBC, the group had initially used a stolen red Kia Forte to ram through the storefront, and surveillance cameras inside Stryker's Shooting World captured images of the suspects, which the Las Cruces Police Department later released.
The break-in left the store's owner worried heading into the holiday season, the outlet's reporting noted, and the smash-and-grab tactics used to breach the storefront reflect a pattern authorities say they've seen increasingly among local youth.
A Class Schedule Cracks the Case
Investigators solved the case after locating the abandoned Kia Rio and discovering a student class schedule belonging to one of the teenage co-defendants sitting inside, per the same account from Organ Mountain News. That single piece of paper linked the getaway vehicle directly to local high school students and set the broader investigation in motion.
Las Cruces police initially arrested four teenage boys, ages 14 to 16, on November 24, 2025, according to KRWG Public Media. Two additional 16-year-old boys were taken into custody the following month, bringing the total number of charged juveniles to six. Hoodline previously reported on the initial arrests in November.
Prosecutors Push to Try Teens as Adults
Doña Ana County District Attorney Fernando Macias has characterized the burglary as a “military-style” operation and announced plans to petition the court to try and sentence all six teenage co-defendants as adults, according to footage reported by KFOX-TV. Macias has argued that the structured nature of the raid warrants adult sanctions rather than juvenile penalties.
Under New Mexico's Delinquency Act and state Supreme Court precedent, prosecutors seeking adult sentences for 14-to-17-year-old “youthful offenders” must convince a judge during a formal amenability hearing that the juvenile cannot be rehabilitated within the youth justice system, per FindLaw. The state Supreme Court ruled in State v. Rudy B. that judges, not juries, decide those amenability questions, meaning it remains unresolved whether any of the six teens will ultimately face adult sentencing.
A Broader Pattern of Armed Youth Crime
Although total juvenile arrests in Las Cruces declined from 648 in 2022 to 618 in 2023 and 527 in 2024, Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story has reported that the severity of offenses committed by minors has increased significantly, led by violent assaults and property crimes involving firearms, per the same KFOX-TV report. Community leaders have pointed to growing alarm over local youth acquiring illegal firearms as a driver of that trend.
This is not the first time Stryker's Shooting World has been targeted. The store was previously burglarized on November 13, 2012, when 22 firearms, including four silencers, were stolen as part of an interstate burglary ring that took 72 weapons from four gun shops in El Paso and Las Cruces, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Defendant Emilio Sandoval later pleaded guilty in federal court in that earlier case.
Federal Lawmakers Eye Tougher Penalties
The Las Cruces case arrives amid a broader national push to crack down on commercial gun store burglaries. In June, federal lawmakers reintroduced the Federal Firearms Licensee Protection Act, which would raise the maximum prison sentence for stealing FFL inventory from 10 to 20 years and establish a three-year mandatory minimum for gun store burglaries, according to the Office of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The ATF has recorded 23,319 firearms stolen from federally licensed dealers nationwide between 2021 and 2025.
Federal regulations already require licensed gun dealers to submit ATF Form 3310.11 within 48 hours of discovering any missing or stolen firearms, notifying both federal authorities and local police to help trace weapons before they reach illicit markets, per the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That reporting requirement underscores the regulatory stakes gun shop owners face after break-ins like the one at Stryker's.
Las Cruces has seen other gun store burglary attempts in recent months. Hoodline also covered federal charges tied to a break-in attempt at Miller Guns and Ammo. It remains unclear how the remaining five co-defendants in the Stryker's case will be adjudicated, or whether any will face the adult sentencing prosecutors are seeking.
