{"id":16227,"date":"2025-10-08T18:35:33","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T00:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/two-suspects-in-cortez-slaying-to-appear-in-court-in-december\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T21:55:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T03:55:52","slug":"two-suspects-in-cortez-slaying-to-appear-in-court-in-december","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/two-suspects-in-cortez-slaying-to-appear-in-court-in-december\/","title":{"rendered":"Two suspects in Cortez slaying to appear in court in December"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure class=\"wp-block-image naviga-inline-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/imengine.public.prod.dur.navigacloud.com\/?uuid=bf75bec3-55e8-5817-b0c2-0b05e32f550a&amp;function=cover&amp;type=preview&amp;source=false&amp;width=2000\" width=\"1178\" height=\"753\" alt=\"Robert Salt (left) and Nikhona Holiday (right) are suspects in the murder of a man in Veterans Park on Wednesday night. Two other victims are in the hospital.\" class=\"naviga-image\" loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">Robert Salt (left) and Nikhona Holiday (right) are suspects in the murder of a man in Veterans Park on Wednesday night. Two other victims are in the hospital.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>Robert Salt and Nykhona Holiday, charged in the August homicide at Veterans Park in Cortez, are set for preliminary hearings Dec. 12 in 22nd Judicial District Court. They face first-degree murder and assault charges.<\/p>\n<p>Both face unrelated County Court charges, with hearings set after the preliminary hearing.<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday, Holiday appeared in custody for two pretrial hearings and one probation hearing. Her attorney, Stephen Singer, asked Judge Ian MacLaren to delay those cases until after the homicide hearing.<\/p>\n<p>He told MacLaren they were working toward resolutions for Holiday.<\/p>\n<p>MacLaren approved the delay, rescheduling Holiday\u2019s hearings for 9 a.m. Dec. 23.<\/p>\n<p>Salt\u2019s five unrelated hearings are set for 10 a.m. Dec. 16.<\/p>\n<p>Police arrested Salt and Holiday on Aug. 20 after a man was found dead in Veterans Park with \u201cobvious blunt force trauma.\u201d Two other victims, Bilbert Tsosie and Anthony Hill, survived but had similar injuries.<\/p>\n<p>At their Aug. 21 hearing, witnesses said Salt and Holiday reportedly kicked the victims repeatedly in the head.<\/p>\n<p>Judge William Furse set bond at $3 million for Salt and $1 million for Holiday.<\/p>\n<p>At the same hearing, Singer said Holiday was \u201cthreatened\u201d and \u201ccoerced\u201d into helping Salt, who allegedly told her to \u201cprove she was with him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>dies in beating in Veterans Park; two others injured<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,133,168,28,60,29,76],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-16227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-courts","tag-crime","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-county","tag-newsletter","tag-u-s-22nd-judicial-district"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16227"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20083,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227\/revisions\/20083"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16227"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=16227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}