Despite Red Flags, G.O.P. Backed Candidate Now Charged in Shootings

Javier Martinez, a Democrat whose home was targeted, said he had “never experienced anything like this before.” Mr. Martinez, who took over this month as New Mexico’s speaker of the House, tied Mr. Peña’s extremism to the election lies voiced by Mr. Trump.

“The previous president, I think, really exploited some of those feelings,” Mr. Martinez said. “And we’ve seen it play out in different ways, including the insurrection in Washington, D.C., including this set of events here in our own backyard.”

Mr. Peña presented himself as someone on the mend, leading groups in prayer at political meetings and telling neighbors that he did not drink or take drugs. But he made little effort to hide his extreme views. His campaign website denounced “the demonic theories of the Globalist Elites and their foreign counterparts,” called feminism “demonicism,” and said the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump by “enemy combatants” who “must be placed in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the remainder of their natural lives.”

During his campaign, Mr. Peña highlighted his time as a Navy hospital corpsman assigned to a Marine division in Okinawa, Japan. But promotion data provided by the U.S. Navy’s public affairs office shows that Mr. Peña hardly served with distinction. He was demoted twice during his four years in the service and left the military in 2004 at the lowest possible rank. The Navy was unable to provide the reasons for Mr. Peña’s demotions.

Mr. Peña ran on a platform of cracking down on crime, despite his own criminal history. He served nearly seven years in prison in New Mexico on charges including burglary and larceny after being part of a “smash-and-grab” crew that slammed vehicles into retail stores, including a Kmart in Albuquerque, then stole items, according to court records.

After being released from prison in 2016, Mr. Peña tried selling cars at a dealership in Albuquerque but lasted less than a month before he was fired for showing up late, court records from a lawsuit filed by Mr. Peña in 2017 show. (The case was dismissed.) Mr. Peña also enrolled at the University of New Mexico, obtaining a political science degree in 2021, the same year that his voting rights were restored after his prison term.

Mr. Peña appears to have run for the Republican nomination for the state legislative seat unopposed. In October, he received an endorsement from the Republican National Hispanic Assembly’s New Mexico chapter. Ronnie Lucero, the chairman of both the group’s national organization and the state chapter, said that he had spoken with Mr. Peña at events during the campaign, and that the candidate had filled out a questionnaire asking about his professional, financial and criminal history before the group endorsed him.