Tragedy ·
The 911 Call From Las Cruces Bowl
Shot five times at age 12, a girl called for help after two gunmen shot seven people. Four died that day; by 2023, the case remained unsolved.
Twelve-year-old Melissia Repass had been shot five times when she called 911 from the office at Las Cruces Bowl on February 10, 1990. Two gunmen had shot seven people, set a fire in the room and left. According to KOAT, Repass was the only person still conscious inside the bowling alley. “Please help me,” she told the dispatcher.
The dispatcher asked her to slow down. “We were all shot in a hold up,” Repass said. Asked how many people were hurt, she counted: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.” The dispatcher repeated the number. “Yes,” she answered.
That morning, her mother, Stephanie Senac, the bowling alley’s manager, had been preparing to open the business. Repass and her 13-year-old friend, Amy Houser, were there to help supervise the day care. The cook, Ida Holguin, was in the kitchen when two men entered through an unlocked door. One pointed a pistol at Holguin and ordered her into the office, where the other gunman was holding Senac and the girls.
The men ordered the women and children to lie down and took approximately $4,000 to $5,000 from the safe. Steven Teran, the bowling alley’s 26-year-old pin mechanic, arrived with 6-year-old Paula Holguin and 2-year-old Valerie Teran. Unable to find a babysitter, he had brought the girls to the day care. He entered the manager’s office and encountered the gunmen. All seven people in the room were shot multiple times. Before leaving, the attackers set papers on the desk alight.
Repass reached the office phone. Police officers and firefighters moved the victims from the burning office into the lobby, where treatment began. Four people died that day: Steven Teran, Paula Holguin, Valerie Teran and Amy Houser. Repass, Senac and Ida Holguin survived the immediate attack. Senac died in August 1999 from complications of her injuries.
The two attackers remained unidentified. Police established roadblocks around Las Cruces, and aircraft searched the area, but no arrests followed those initial efforts. Years later, Detective Mark Myers described the office as “a very complicated crime scene.” Investigators recovered fingerprints, he said, but their presence offered no simple answer: “It was a bowling alley. You would expect to find that.”
By February 2023, the case was still unsolved. Anthony Teran, Steven’s brother, was still asking for answers. “Thirty-three years, man,” he told KOAT. A documentary about the killings was being screened again, and its director hoped it could bring in leads. Teran acknowledged that some people might tell him to give up. He could understand that, he said, “to a point.” But he was not ready to stop: “We need justice.”