New Mexico Police Shoot Suspect During Chase In Santa Fe – Associated Press
Authorities are investigating the third shooting by law enforcement officers in Santa Fe in the past two weeks.
In the latest case, New Mexico State Police officers shot and wounded a suspect Sunday morning during a foot chase in a neighborhood on the city's south side.
State police officers were dispatched to help with a call that involved a man who was sitting on the train tracks near Interstate 25.
Authorities said in a news release that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before running across the interstate and toward a residential area. The man fired at least one shot at officers during the chase.
Officers fired back, shooting the unidentified man at least once. Authorities said he was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life threatening.
State police also are investigating two other shootings by officers in Santa Fe, including one on June 23 in which a suspect in an earlier shooting at park was killed by Santa Fe police near Loretto Chapel. That same evening, Santa Fe County sheriff's deputies killed a man who pointed a gun at them after leading them on a car chase.
Lawsuit Claims Man Who Sparked Treasure Hunt Retrieved Own Loot – Santa Fe New Mexican, Associated Press
A French treasure hunter has sued the estate of a Santa Fe, New Mexico, antiquities dealer who sparked a yearslong search across the American West by hiding a chest filled with gold, coins and other valuables.
Bruno Raphoz is seeking $10 million in a complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court in New Mexico. He claims the late Forrest Fenn deprived him of the riches by moving the treasure chest after he solved a riddle that would lead him to the loot.
The lawsuit comes a year after another man found the treasure in Wyoming, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
"It appeared suspicious to everyone," Raphoz said in the lawsuit. "Our assumption is that (Forrest) Fenn went to retrieve the chest himself, declared it found publicly and kept the content for himself."
In his autobiography, "The Thrill of the Chase," Fenn said he buried the chest somewhere in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe. His book included a poem that contained clues on where the chest was hidden. For a decade, thousands of people roamed the Rockies in search of the treasure estimated to be worth at least $1 million.
Several treasure seekers had to be rescued from precarious situations and as many as six died.
Raphoz's lawsuit is just the latest legal claim to be spurred by the treasure hunt. A number of people have sued, alleging Fenn betrayed them or gave misleading clues.
Shiloh Old, Fenn's grandson, could not be reached for comment.
Raphoz said he used the clues to determine Fenn's treasure was in southwestern Colorado. He informed Fenn he solved the puzzle and was on his way to retrieve the chest. However, his plans were derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, and Fenn announced a short time later that the treasure had been found.
Fenn died in September at age 90 without saying who found the chest or specifically where.
Fenn's grandson confirmed in December that Jonathan "Jack" Stuef, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan, discovered it. Fenn said before his death that the treasure was in Wyoming, but neither Stuef nor Fenn's relatives have specified where.
Podcast Explores Creation Of US Parks With Indigenous Voices - By Matt Dahlseid, Santa Fe New Mexican
In the first minutes of the first episode of a new podcast called Parks, Shane Doyle speaks of being largely unaware of his family's sprawling roots in the area known today as Yellowstone National Park while he was growing up in the small town of Crow Agency, Montana.
A member of the Crow Nation, Doyle's ancestors were forcibly removed from the land that was eventually established as the world's first national park in 1872. His family had been detached from this land for generations, and the park known internationally for its remarkable geothermal features and stunning wildlife was relatively foreign to him as a youth.
While obtaining his master's degree in Native American studies, Doyle became well-versed in the onslaught of obstacles that confronted his and nearly 30 other tribes associated with the Yellowstone area.
The tribes contended with diseases like smallpox brought to the continent by European colonizers, broken land rights treaties by the United States government, the killing off of their primary food source — bison — and a forced assimilation into mainstream European American culture through Native American boarding schools.
"Quite frankly, there was an ethnic cleansing on this ground," Doyle says in the 28-minute debut episode of Parks titled "Yellowstone," which was released June 22. "And the cleansing was not just the people and the culture, but it was also the memory, it was the history, it was the way of life that existed for thousands of years that all of the sudden vanished."
As the popularity of America's national parks continues to surge, Parks co-creators and Santa Fe-based multimedia journalists Mary Mathis and Cody Nelson urge visitors to educate themselves about and acknowledge the Indigenous tribes whose ties to these sacred spaces span millennia.
The aim of the documentary podcast is to explore the history of tribes on these lands, the ways in which the lands were dispossessed, issues the Indigenous communities face today, and how they've kept their culture and traditions alive, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
"There's so much that was written, but when it was written, it was from the point of view of Eastern colonizers," said Mathis, 25, a former photo editor at National Public Radio and Outside magazine who serves as the host of Parks. "It wasn't every story, it was just one story — the quote, unquote 'winner's' story. We see that a lot in our education system and I think that was where the idea (for Parks) kind of came from."
The first episode follows a format the Parks team plans to replicate throughout the project, one where Indigenous guests are closely involved in each step of the editing process so as to maintain complete ownership of their stories.
The guests' feedback is considered at every point in the editing of an episode, creating a collaborative environment of storytelling.
"For a long time, Native people have not had ownership of the narrative about what the wider general public knows about Indigenous people, so it's really critical that the guests have complete ownership of the process because that's the most important part," said Taylor Hensel, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who serves as a story editor for the podcast. "That's the only way to tell authentic stories."
Mathis and Nelson began research for Parks last summer. The couple, who moved to Santa Fe from the Midwest last year, had to conduct all of their interviews via phone or video call because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nelson, 28, said the obstacle ended up shaping the show in a positive way.
"It forced us to get creative, which I think wound up being a good thing because the format we've taken is using the voices of our guests rather than the voices of me and Mary," said Nelson, a former reporter for Minnesota Public Radio. "We've aimed to go really light on the narration and really heavy on our guests' voices."
Hensel was one of the consultants Mathis and Nelson reached out to early on while contemplating the path of the podcast. She works full-time as a producer for Nia Tero, a nonprofit based in Seattle that works globally with Indigenous people, specifically when it comes to land rights and the environment.
The Parks project excited Hensel, and she accepted an offer to join the small team as its third member.
Hensel said her view of national parks is tied to the history of dispossession and broken treaties that took the lands away from their original inhabitants.
"As a Native person, I live every single day knowing that this is stolen land, and this land doesn't belong to the people who claim to own it. National parks are no exception," Hensel said. "When I enter those spaces, I carry that weight with me, knowing that land was stolen from Indigenous peoples. It certainly is heavy and I personally believe that that land should be given back. I hope to see that one day."
Hensel is also passionate about the words used when speaking about natural spaces such as national parks.
It's common to hear language that discounts the history of Indigenous tribes on these lands, such as referring to the environments as "pristine" and "untouched." Hensel works with Mathis and Nelson to be intentional and thoughtful about the words being used in the narration.
"Taylor is someone who is working with us consistently to decolonize the language that we use in the script," Mathis said. "There have been rewrites and rewrites and rewrites of sentences where we maybe used a word that had some sort of power dynamic to it, and she's really opening our eyes to the ways in which we really do need to decolonize our language, especially in journalism."
Another unique aspect of the podcast's production is the compensation of guests who share their stories.
The not-for-profit project is funded by donations and out of the pockets of Mathis and Nelson, who both freelance to earn a living. Nelson said they offer a small honorarium, sometimes around $50 or so, to guests for their contributions.
The Parks team plans on releasing an episode each month during the summer, then seeing where things go from there. They've already conducted all the interviews for the second episode, which will focus on Native tribes living in and around the Grand Canyon, and hope to release the episode in July.
Mathis and Nelson said their perspective on national parks has changed considerably while working on the project and speaking with Indigenous people whose lives have been impacted by land dispossession.
"It's a far more complicated picture, I'd say, from what I've learned," Nelson said. "It makes you think about everything a lot differently.
"I will still go to national parks; I'm not going to boycott the system, but I am going to live in a way that doesn't become a party to this awful commodification of nature and the erasure of the people whose lands this is."
Political Appointees Included In Payouts For Unused Vacation - By Morgan Lee Associated Press
Top political appointees of the governor at agencies outside the field of health care were offered many of the largest payments to acknowledge skipped vacations during the pandemic in 2020, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Under ordinary circumstances, state employees lose without payment any unused vacation leave in excess of 240 hours at the end of the year.
Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham gave state workers additional time to use that vacation leave and in June offered up to 80 hours of salary to people who still have not used excess vacation allotments.
Employees also were allowed to opt out and utilize the excess vacation time by July 9. Records were not immediately available that indicate which employees declined payments.
Public records show that potential payouts of more than $4,000 were offered to the state secretary of finance and administration, directors of the Public School Insurance Authority and the Expo New Mexico venue that hosts the state fair, as well as two officials at the State Investment Council that oversees multibillion-dollar public trust funds.
Payments for unused vacation time were offered to 84 political appointees, at an average of $2,020. The largest of those offers — for $5,616 — went to the chief operating officer at the Office of the Governor.
Lujan Grisham said in a letter to state personnel officials that the approved payments "underscore our sincere appreciation for the work state employees have done during a trying time."
Payouts averaging about $940 were offered to 728 nonpolitical state employees in middle-management, professional and rank-and-file positions.
The very highest vacation-leave payout of $13,794 was offered to a physician at Miners Colfax Medical Center, a public hospital based in Raton. No other offer exceeded $6,000.
The payout plan for unused vacation time was approved as Lujan Grisham ramps up her campaign for reelection and looks for ways to reignite the state economy after one of the nation's most aggressive emergency health shutdowns.
Lujan Grisham's administration has been both praised and reviled for the public health restrictions during the pandemic that suspended most in-person schooling for a year, mandated masks and closed down indoor dining, entertainment venues and state museums.
On Thursday, the state lifted most pandemic restrictions on businesses and public gatherings. And on Friday, Lujan Grisham announced that federal relief will provide a back-to-work bonus of up to $1,000 for those who find work and leave unemployment rolls.
Extraordinary work demands during the pandemic made it difficult for many state employees to take paid vacation that they earned, said State Personnel Office Secretary Ricky Serna. Agency budgets can cover the payments for unused vacation, he said, without new appropriations by lawmakers.
Redistricting Panel Rejects Proposed Rule On Private Talks - Albuquerque Journal, Associated Press
New Mexico's new redistricting committee has rejected a rule proposed by its chairman to bar or require disclosure of members' conversations with non-members about maps for new congressional and legislative districts.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Edward Chavez had included the proposal in his suggested package of rules for the committee and said it would provide transparency,the Albuquerque Journal reported.
The proposed rule would have prohibited committee members from engaging in private communication with non-members about a proposed district plan or part of a plan. Any such communications that occur would have to be reported to the chairman and disclosed at the next public meeting.
The proposal was criticized by conservative activists and left-leaning community groups, with concerns being raised about discouraging participation from people who couldn't testify at a public meeting.
Committee member Lisa Curtis said the rule exceeded what was outlined in the state law establishing the committee and it wasn't appropriate to treat the group's work as a judicial proceeding.
"I want to have an open door policy with the public," she said.
The committee on Friday accepted the rest of Chavez's rules package.
New Mexico's New State Crime Lab Aims To Boost Efficiency - By Isabella Alves Albuquerque Journal
Something big is happening in New Mexico's effort to fight crime.
A 44,000-square-foot, $21.9 million forensic lab for the state is being built in Santa Fe. Construction workers broke ground in February and work is set to be completed by fall 2022.
The new building will replace a much smaller lab that was built in the 1970s, said Katharina Babcock, the state Department of Public Safety's forensic laboratory director.
"We're looking at quadrupling the size of the lab and actually being in a building that is meant to be a forensic laboratory," she told the Albuquerque Journal. "Everybody was able to provide input using their experience in this lab."
The department has three labs — in Santa Fe, Las Cruces and Hobbs — that serve over 300 law enforcement agencies. The only law enforcement agency in the state that has its own forensic laboratory is the Albuquerque Police Department.
"I think that's really important for people to know that we don't just serve Santa Fe," Babcock said. "And the services that we provide are free to our client agencies."
In fiscal year 2020, the laboratory received 17,930 items for analysis from 8,609 cases, according to the department.
The lab will continue to offer fingerprinting analysis and services related to firearms and tool marks, controlled substances and biology — which includes DNA testing.
Babcock said it's not out of the question to potentially add more accreditation areas in the future, but, right now, that lab is looking to move into the new space under its current disciplines.
In addition to more space, the lab will also add more equipment and personnel to increase evidence processing times, she said.
"We do have backlogs," Babcock said. "I would hope that, when we are in the new facilities with additional personnel, we will be able to manage those backlogs a little better."
In addition to the increased space, the lab also recently implemented RFID — Radio Frequency IDentification — monitoring technology to help keep track of evidence and preserve the chain of custody, she said.
This means an officer can submit the evidence and attach a barcode to it. This way, all the lab has to do is scan the code and the information will immediately upload to the system.
Babcock also said it allows the lab to track evidence to make sure it doesn't enter an area where it isn't supposed to be.
"We can actually watch the movement of evidence throughout the lab and, if something were, to say, pass a critical point, an alarm would sound," she said.
But the new space isn't the only thing the lab is accomplishing.
Every few years, the lab must go through an accreditation process that involves a thorough and complete review of all laboratory operations, Babcock said.
The lab was recently accredited for International Organizations for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission standards under the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation.
This means lab operations are compliant with national and international standards for forensic labs. Accreditation is an ongoing process, Babcock said, but the current accreditation is valid until the fall of 2022.
Getting accredited during the pandemic wasn't an easy task, Babcock said, and it involved a lot of virtual meetings and paperwork deadlines. Babcock noted the process was just as rigorous, if not more so, than it would have been if the accreditation was conducted in person.
"The work that we do here in the lab is very important not only to the citizens of New Mexico, but also the entire criminal justice community," she said. "And I think that the public deserves to know that the forensic laboratory that is providing services throughout the state of New Mexico is operating at the highest level."
Hobbs Settles Ex-Officers' Suit Over Race-Based Enforcement – KOB-TV, Associated Press
Hobbs will pay a $1.4 million settlement to three former police officers whose whistleblower lawsuit alleged they were subjected to racist language and directed to target minority neighborhoods.
The 2017 lawsuit filed former officers Brandon Ellis, Vasshawn Robinson and Jeremy Artis was settled Thursday in federal court in Albuquerque, KOB-TV reported.
The ex-officers alleged they were told to make their traffic ticket quota by stopping Black people and mocked and degraded for not complying with the directive.
They also alleged the Police Departmentretaliated against them after they reported the alleged discrimination, saying they were harassed, needlessly put in danger and subjected to a hostile work environment.
City Manager Manny Gomez said the city's insurer decided to settle the case though a thorough review of records left officials "confident that minority members of our community were not targeted for police enforcement."
Hobbs, Gomez added in a statement, "will remain an inclusive community for people of all walks of life."
Court records said the case was set for trial Nov. 8 until the settlement resulted from a June 3 settlement conference lasting nearly seven hours.
Hobbs, which had a 2019 estimated population of 39,141, is 260 miles southeast of Albuquerque.
Albuquerque Man Gets Prison For Threatening A Police Officer - Associated Press
An Albuquerque man has been sentenced to nearly 3 ½ years in prison for threatening to kill a New Mexico State Police officer who gave him traffic tickets.
The Albuquerque Journal reports that 66-year-old Michael Nissen received a sentence of three years and five months.
He will have to serve three years of supervised release after his prison term.
In August 2019, a federal court jury found Nissen guilty on two counts of using interstate communication to threaten to injure someone.
According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Nissen was pulled over in November 2018 by State Police on Interstate 40 in Torrance County and issued multiple citations.
Nissen called State Police dispatch multiple times and made threats.
State Police arrested Nissen and records show officers searched his home and found a pistol, multiple rifles, 20 pounds of packaged marijuana, 32 plants in the process of drying and equipment hydroponic growing system.
Body Of Man Who Was Swept Away By Carlsbad Floodwaters ID'd - Associated Press
New Mexico State Police have identified the body of a man who died after being swept away by floodwaters in Carlsbad.
Police said it's unclear why 63-year-old John Paul Koch drove past barricades and into rapid moving floodwaters over the roadway Tuesday.
Koch's vehicle overturned several times and was swept away in the Dark Canyon Draw Arroyo.
Police said rescue efforts were unsuccessful because of the high volume and intensity of the flood.
Crews delayed recovering the body, waiting for floodwaters to recede to a safe level for personnel to enter the water.
State Police and members of the Carlsbad Fire Department flew a drone Wednesday afternoon in an area near a low water crossing and pinpointed the spot where Koch's body washed up.
Divers recovered the body around 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Koch's body was sent to the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque for an autopsy.
New Mexico Forest Draws Crowd For Annual 'Rainbow Gathering' - By Cedar Attanasio Associated Press / Report For America
Across a mile-long stretch of forest in a remote part of northern New Mexico, the party is in full swing.
Tents dotted mountain meadows flanked by dense stands of trees.
Makeshift kitchens were erected to feed the hundreds of people gathering for what would be a weekend-long celebration attended by grandmothers, families with children and others in search of peace, camaraderie and perhaps to smoke a little weed.
This is the Rainbow Family.
The Carson National Forest, just beyond the tourist enclave of Taos, was chosen as the spot for this year's national gathering. But people also were congregating for the July 4 celebration in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The so-called Rainbow Gathering — which draws an array of characters who range from office workers looking to get away from the daily grind to nature lovers and those who have mastered van life — was set to culminate Sunday in a silent hand-holding circle punctuated by a loud "ohm."
Normally, the gathering, which was first held in 1972 in Colorado, draws around 10,000 people to a single forest. This year, the participants are less numerous and heading to regional meet-ups because of COVID-19 concerns. Last July 4, regulars joined each other online to "ohm from home."
For Gina "Mama G" Prince, the gathering is about peace. For others, they are united by anti-authoritarianism rooted in the religious and congregational freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.
With pandemic restrictions easing, Prince said she was happy to be at her first Rainbow Gathering since 2019, when the event was held in Wisconsin.
"I've been counting the moments to come out here," said the 67-year-old Florida resident, who picked up a fellow Rainbow participant in Tennessee on the way. Wary of the virus and bogged down with underlying health concerns, her partner stayed in Florida.
In one camp, cooks prepared sweet strawberry pastries and served them to whoever was around the campfire. Money is frowned upon at the gathering, and participants bring food donations to share. Volunteers run every aspect of the camp, from piping water out of streams to digging latrines, to cleaning up the camp and packing up trash.
Drum circles are a nightly event. So are fireside discussions about everything from dinner plans to the nature of existence and metaphysics.
The annual gatherings also draw close scrutiny from the U.S. Forest Service.
Officials with the Carson National Forest held an online forum last month for residents to ask questions about enforcing drug laws, respecting sacred tribal lands in the forest, and the plan for taking out the trash.
Forest Service officials say gatherings in recent years left surprisingly little impact on water, erosion and other areas of concern to forest officials. With a fraction of the normal participants this year, the concerns are even fewer.
Still, rangers had seized an undisclosed number of guns and cited people for things as minor as a cracked windshield. Other charges involved marijuana and methamphetamine possession.
For decades, the Rainbows have complained that law enforcement assigned to patrol them have used any excuse to pull them over and search them.
Prince said she and another woman were searched on their way into the gathering, and her friend's marijuana stash was seized. New Mexico this week legalized the recreational use of marijuana, but it's still illegal on federal land.
"They pulled people over and took all their weed," Prince said. "Pulled over a couple of grandmas."
The gathering normally boasts a giant bakery, hauled up mountainsides by hand and constructed out of metal barrels. Volunteers crank out as many as 8,000 dinner rolls per night from their perch in the woods.
"It takes about 35 of us to make the magic happen," said long-time Rainbow member Darrell Schauermann of Taos.
There are perils that can come with camping in a remote spot at high altitude.
On Friday, an elderly man with cancer fell gravely ill. It took an SUV, a Forest Service pickup truck and an ambulance to get him to a spot miles down the mountain where he could be loaded into a helicopter and taken to a hospital. Along the way, he was tended to by John Hartberg, a 33-year-old physician from New Orleans who was attending the event.
Shirtless and wearing a hat and a turquoise stethoscope, he declined to comment on the patient's condition, citing medical privacy rules.
Usla Gregory, 45, of Taos said the patient was his best friend. "We share the same astrological signs," he said, before breaking into tears.
After the July 4th celebration, Rainbows who choose to participate in a selection committee will pick a spot for next year's gathering. Insiders suggest that Colorado is the leading contender.