All Nicole Jones knew Monday afternoon was that she wanted her kids to be safe.

The mother of two Carlos Gilbert Elementary School students waited 45 anxious minutes Monday afternoon for police to escort her third- and fifth-graders out of the downtown Santa Fe school after threats of a shooting at the adjacent state District Court building led police to put the area under lockdown for several hours.

"As long as they're doing what they need to do to keep them safe, I'm fine," Jones said.

By 9 p.m., police had in custody a 22-year-old Chimayó man they say is responsible for making death threats to a judge presiding over a burglary case at the courthouse on Grant Avenue.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano said deputies found Steven A. Martinez "hiding in some bushes" Monday night off Rio Arriba County Road 102, where he was placed under arrest on an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court on a previous charge.

"He is in custody, so the District Attorney's Office will review the case and proceed on charges related to the threats," Solano said. "For now, he's just being held on the warrant, but we're confident this is the guy."

Police say 911 emergency dispatchers received a call at 1:20 p.m. Monday in which the caller indicated someone was going to shoot a judge at the courthouse. Twenty minutes later, a call was placed to the office of District Judge Michael Vigil, the judge presiding over Martinez's pending burglary case, in which the caller said something to the effect of "I'm coming to kill you," according to Solano.

Police say the threat was against "a judge," not specifically Vigil.

"Any time we get a call like this, even if they never really said specifically which judge they were targeting, we take it very serious," said Solano, whose department is in charge of providing security at the courthouse.

According to Vigil's court docket, Martinez was scheduled to be sentenced on two felony burglary charges on Sept. 20. However, online court records on Martinez's case contained apparently out-of-date information indicating that he was scheduled to be sentenced Monday.

"We're thinking he thought he was going to be sentenced and was probably trying to buy more time," Solano said.

The sheriff said his deputies think Martinez might have shown up at the courthouse on Monday afternoon after the lockdown was initiated but before officers identified him as the suspect involved in the threatening calls.

"We're looking into whether he was one of the people that was turned away after we stopped letting people in," Solano said.

Courthouse employees were evacuated and Vigil, along with all the other state district judges in the building, were escorted out by officers shortly after the second call was received.

Santa Fe police escorted the last of the students at Carlos Gilbert by 3:20 p.m., and the roadblocks around the courthouse were taken down by 4:15 p.m. While armed sheriff's deputies were seen at the doors to the courthouse after that, the SWAT team and other uniformed officers outside the building left the area.

Parents of Carlos Gilbert students were supposed to receive automated voice messages alerting them of the incident, but some claimed they did not.

Adolfo Ruiz, who was turned away by police when he went to pick up his daughters from the school and couldn't figure out why, said he walked through back streets and finally arrived at the school entrance to find a long line of parents.

"I'm not scared — I just don't know what is going on," he said. "I want to know that my daughters are OK."

Just a few minutes later, Ruiz saw his wife, Evangelina, walking toward him with both their daughters, Edith, 6 and Diana, 9.

Officials asked that people who had business at the courthouse Monday afternoon to call today to reschedule and said allowances for the court closure will be made.

Solano said police tracked the source of at least one of the calls to a cell phone that was recently disconnected. He said disconnected cellular telephones can still call 911, even if there is not an active phone line associated with the device, which "makes it harder to track, but not impossible."

Security concerns are among the various reasons a new courthouse has been in the works for two years. Santa Fe County began work on a new District Court building on Sandoval Street at Manhattan Avenue in early 2009, but the project has been slowed considerably by the discovery of hydrocarbon pollution on the site.

Most of the activities that have taken place at the site since the contamination was discovered have been aimed at cleaning up contamination believed to have come from gas stations located near the site over the past 30 years.

Santa Fe County has spent about $17 million of the approximately $60 million budgeted for the project so far on planning the building, excavating in preparation for the building's underground parking garage and removing contaminated water and soil from the site.

New Mexican reporters Sandra Baltazar Martínez and Phaedra Haywood contributed to this article.

Contact Geoff Grammer at 986-3076 or ggrammer@sfnewmexican.com.