Longtime friend says Tera Chavez didn’t like guns
By Jeff Proctor / Journal Staff Writer on Mon, Jun 24, 2013
12:48 p.m.
Tera Chavez “didn’t like guns,” according to testimony this morning from a longtime friend with whom she had a complicated relationship.
Samantha Wheeler testified today — as the third week of the murder trial against Chavez’s husband, Levi Chavez, began — that she had been the maid of honor at the couple’s wedding.
Later on, in August 2007, Tera Chavez told Wheeler that she had been having an affair with Wheeler’s husband, Nick Wheeler.
Three days after Levi Chavez allegedly killed Tera in the couples home in Los Lunas, Nick Wheeler confessed the affair to his wife. That was October 24, 2007, a date Samantha Wheeler remembered well because it was her birthday, she testified this morning.
Samantha Wheeler testified that her friendship with Tera Chavez began in high school and carried on into adulthood. She said knew Tera to have emotional ups and downs because of Levi’s infidelities, but never knew her to broadly depressed.
In the last months of Tera’s life, according to Wheeler’s testimony, “she was ready to move on.”
In an interview with detectives after Tera’s death, Samantha Wheeler said she believed the 26-year-old might be capable of suicide by drug overdose or by cutting her wrists. But Tera never would have shot herself, Samantha, told detectives.
Earlier this morning, during a hearing to decide whether an alibi witness for Levi Chavez had a Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying, his attorney asked for immunity from prosecution. Bryan McKay, the lead prosecutor on the Chavez case, said he would not be able to grant immunity to Russell Perea, the former APD officer who was sharing a police vehicle on the weekend Tera died. “If there was any kind of perjury, it would have been in Bernalillo County,” McKay said.
The question now is whether State District Judge George P. Eichwald, who is presiding over the Chavez murder, could grant Perea immunity. After conducting a brief interview with Perea and his attorney in chambers, Eichwald said in open court that he would research that question. The judge expects to announce his findings some time in the next week.
Prosecutors expect to rest their case on either Friday or next Monday.
