UPDATE:

Sheriff Greg Solano and District Attorney Spence Pacheco have released the blood-alcohol content from the June 28 crash involving Scott Owens and five teenagers.

  The blood alcohol content on Scott Owens was found to be 0.16 which is twice the legal limit of .08. A search warrant was obtained for the blood of Avree Koffman,16, driver of the vehicle in which 4 teens were killed and those results came back as .00 revealing no alcohol in the blood. Only Alcohol content was revealed in the initial tests. Tests for drugs are not included in these results.

Prosecutors have received the result of a court-ordered blood draw on Scott Owens, the man accused of causing the crash that killed four Santa Fe teenagers last weekend, but are refusing to release the information.

District Attorney Angela "Spence" Pacheco confirmed Saturday that the test of Owens' blood-alcohol content was completed last week. However, she said she wouldn't release the result because she wants to minimize the pretrial publicity on the case as much as possible.

"It's hard to get the public to understand," Pacheco said. "I have an obligation to not create pretrial publicity."

Owens, 27, was behind the wheel of a 1992 Jeep Cherokee that law enforcement officials have said was traveling in the wrong lane of Old Las Vegas Highway during the early morning hours of June 28, when it crashed into the passenger side of a 1992 Subaru sedan carrying five Santa Fe teenagers. Four of the teens — Rose Simmons, 15, Julian Martinez, 16, Alyssa Trouw, 16, and Kate Klein, 16 — died instantly. The driver, Avree Koffman, 16, survived and is recovering in an Albuquerque hospital.

Owens displayed several signs of intoxication after the crash, including smelling of alcohol, bloodshot eyes, slurred speech and unsteady balance. Owens refused to allow a hospital technician to draw a sample of his blood, so Santa Fe County sheriff's deputies were forced to draft a search warrant three hours after the accident and wake up a state District Court judge to sign it. District Judge Michael Vigil signed the warrant at 3:37 a.m., three and a half hours after the crash, according to the warrant.

Owens has been charged with four counts of vehicular homicide and one count of causing great bodily injury by vehicle. He is being held at the Santa Fe County jail in lieu of a $3 million cash-only bond.

Pacheco said Saturday that Owens' BAC will become public record when it is revealed in a future court proceeding. She said she didn't know when that might happen. Pacheco also refused to say, in general, whether Owens was legally intoxicated or whether his blood-alcohol content would alter the current charges against him.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano also declined to release the result, saying he'd been ordered by the District Attorney's Office to keep it quiet.

"We've always released (blood-alcohol content) in the past, but the DA is the one who has to prosecute this case and we'll follow their direction," he said. "It will probably come up in one of the early hearings."

Solano said his office also received the result of Koffman's blood-alcohol test, but the DA's Office told him Saturday he couldn't release that information, either. Technicians at the state crime lab were still conducting drug screens on the blood of both drivers late last week, he said.

In another notorious recent drunken-driving case, Santa Fe police released the blood-alcohol content for Carlos Fierro — who is charged with striking and killing a pedestrian in downtown Santa Fe on Nov. 26 while driving drunk — about two weeks after the crash.

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or :jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.