A Cortez man accused of brutally beating three men in Veterans Park in 2025, killing one of them, entered a not-guilty plea in District Court on Wednesday.
Thirty-three-year-old Robert Salt, Jr., faces numerous charges, including first-degree murder, for allegedly kicking three men in the head on the evening of August 20 of last year. His companion, 21-year-old Nykhona Holiday, is alleged to have helped him and has also been charged with first-degree murder.
Police who responded to the park that night found one man, Curtis Benally, dead, and two others severely injured.
One of them, Anthony Hill, died in March of this year in Arizona, but the cause of death has not been reported.
The other, Bilbert Tsosie, was hospitalized and recovered.
On Wednesday, District Judge William Furse set the trial, which could last up to three weeks, to begin Sept. 8.
Holiday, who has also pleaded not guilty, is set for a separate trial, though initially prosecutors had said the pair could be tried together.
In other news, a man who was struck by a plane and killed after he trespassed onto a runway at Denver International Airport on Friday reportedly had lived in Montezuma County.
Forty-one-year-old Michael Mott is believed to have climbed the airport’s perimeter fence and walked onto the runway in order to commit suicide.
The New York Post reports that he had a lengthy rap sheet that included arrests by Cortez police and the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office stretching from 2005 to 2020. The charges included assault, burglary, and DUI, and the Post reports that he spent years in prison.
He had been living on the Front Range at the time of his death.
