ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — How did a repeat offender on probation allegedly kill an elderly man and carjack multiple other people after cutting off his ankle monitor?

A six-page violation report paints a picture of what happened in the time between when Zachary Babitz allegedly cut his ankle monitor and when he allegedly carjacked and murdered that man.

On Aug. 1, Babitz’s probation officer received an immediate notification about a violation. Babitz allegedly cut off his GPS ankle monitor and dumped it at a gas station in Moriarty.

Lupe Sanchez, the director of the Probation & Parole division of the New Mexico Corrections Department, explained the protocol for what probation officers do in instances like that.

“They immediately reach out to the offender and try to make contact with the offender. And then, if not, then they’ll go to the last known place where the offender was at, where they cut it,” said Sanchez.

In Babitz’s case, that’s what the probation officer did. After the officer found the monitor, they visited his address, tried calling him and even sent him a letter, ordering him to appear in-person on Aug. 6.

On Aug. 6, Babitz didn’t show up. Instead, he allegedly carjacked and killed an elderly man in Santa Fe.

Police believe he went on to carjack multiple people and even robbed an Arby’s in Las Cruces. They caught him, and now he faces federal charges, among other charges, for those alleged crimes.

“In general, for any offender, it’s worst case scenario. Yeah, that’s the last thing we want,” Sanchez said. “At this point, we just want to send out our condolences to the family.”

Sanchez said about 300 officers are in charge of supervising around 14,000 offenders across New Mexico at any given time. He says about 11% of them are on GPS monitors, like Babitz was.

“The difficulty in probation and parole is predicting human behavior. You know, if we could do that, it would solve a lot of our problems, but we can’t. So what we do is try to change behavior, and we do that through all the programming that we offer,” said Sanchez.

Sanchez added the department is always looking at new tools to make things more efficient.

“Our probation officers react quickly to when a bracelets cut. So we’re, I don’t know how much faster we can get in regards to that,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said it’s a tall task to track down someone who doesn’t want to be found.

“I wish we could predict human behavior and prevent all these things, but that would be my superhuman power if I could, you know?” said Sanchez.

Of the 300 probation officers across the state, 120 of them are armed with weapons. Many respond to violations with pepper spray and a taser.

The department is looking to arm more officers.