Rebecca Jaramillo stepped out of the Santa Fe -prison and one night in January 2021. After two days in a cell she was free, but there was no one to pick her up. So, with a snowstorm, she started the long walk to the city.
The prison in Santa Fe, surrounded by barbed wire and Tumbleweed, is on a remote highway far from the bustling square and historic churches of the city. It is almost two miles away the highway to the nearest gas station, three miles to where a sidewalk starts and Eight miles to the nearest homeless shelter.
Mrs. Jaramillo, 33, only made it about a mile of the prison that night before she was hit by a representative of a sheriff who rode a police -Pick -Up truck with 57 miles per hour. Her body was thrown more than 100 feet and she was declared dead on the spot.
Mrs. Jaramillo is one of the many people who died to come out of the Santa Fe prison on foot in recent years. It is a walk that has been much more deadly than previously reported.
Officially known as the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility, the prison was moved to the more remote location in 1998, and it was not long before local leaders took knowledge how dangerous the walk was, even while they did little to solve the problem. As far back as 2002District commissioners expressed that someone can be affected.
Stimulated by the 2015 Death from Alan Cruthirdsit was released and deadly run over, the local newspaper wrote an editorial team Saying that civil servants “have to do more to ensure that prisoners are not at risk.”
But the problem has been sustained. Five people were fatally affected shortly after they have been released over the past decade, four of them since March 2020, according to records obtained by the New York Times. More people have been injured.
Local prisons have been located throughout the country confronted with criticism For releasing people late in the eveninginside Dangerous neighborhoods or without transport options. The federal prison system is required To guarantee access to transport for released prisoners, and many state prison systems do this too. But in many cases local prisons surrender to the people who are released to get home themselves.
With reference to the risks of releasing people at night, the legislators in California passed by an account In 2019 it would need prisons to give prisoners the option to wait until the morning to be released, but Gov. Gavin Newsom veto It said it was too expensive.
In Santa Fe, district commissioners have occasionally tried to improve the situation, but they did not solve the problem. Most nights on a recent week, a steady stream of people walked out of prison and on the side of the highway, wicking a narrow shoulder while commuters and large rigs flew by.
Paul Duran, a former province commissioner, said that the situation could be improved if there was more coordination among judges, who give the orders that release people from prison; prison officials who process their release; The transport agency that runs the buses; and provincial commissioners who assign financing. “They didn’t do anything about it,” he said.
Hank Hughes, one of the five current commissioners of Santa Fe County, acknowledged that civil servants have largely not been successful to make it safer for people to return to the city, but he said that other issues, including trying to reduce overdoses in prison, have taken priority.
“It’s a problem, but it’s one of the many issues about people in prison,” he said.
Buses now stop there in the afternoon, but the prison often lets people go after they have come and disappeared. On a recent day, a bus waited about 15 minutes and left without picking up prisoners. About half an hour later, 10 or so people from prison were released. Some had rides. Others started to walk.
Derek Williams, the prison guards, said prison officers ask prisoners if they need a ride to the city and to inform them that they can wait until a officer controls them in a transport van.
But in interviews, different people who recently released from prison said they had to wait until a few hours, sometimes in hard weather conditions, for the transport bus. A man who walked back from prison said in Spanish that he didn’t know a van was available.
Mr. Williams said it was a shame that released prisoners had to wait until an officer was released to drive them to the city. He said people could get a phone call when they are released. The “vast majority” of that time, he said, prisoners refuse a ride of the prison and walk or are picked up by a friend or family member.
Among the walkers this year this year James Moore, who said he had made the same trek a handful of times after he was released, often in the dark. The worst, he remembered, was about four years ago, when he had new staples in his knee after a car.
“I bumped along the road in the dark, with blood over my leg,” he said. It took him about seven and a half hours to get home that time, he said.
Joe Madrid, 35, said that over the years he had made the walk no less than 25 times, and that he was often worried that drivers could not see him. He said he had had several close calls and could remember that he felt the wind of cars that passed too closely.
“People fly past you at about 60, 70-beam miles per hour,” said Mr. Madrid. “Some of them put on their brights to see you.”
It was late in the evening in March 2020 when Kevin Poirier walked over the highway to a neighboring state prison and a guard asked if he could cash in a check issued by the prison there. He had just been released after he had been arrested because he had not appeared for a hearing, according to the prison reports. The guard in prison told him that he had to leave and, shortly thereafter, heard a “loud thump” from the highway, according to a police report. A truck had Mr. Poirier got deadly and the driver had fled the stage.
Then, in December of that year, Andrew Ortiz was released in prison after an evening. Mr. Ortiz, 58, was his partner, according to Henrietta Cordova, before the couple was separated. She said he had become addicted to drugs and started hearing things.
Mr. Ortiz was released in the afternoon and was dead within about two hours. A woman who drove an SUV hit him about three miles north of the prison.
“I blame the prison for them to just let such people go alone,” said Mrs. Cordova. “If you are in someone’s detention and you can see that they are not mentally good, why would you just open the door and say ‘go’ instead of getting family members and making sure they go where they go safely?”
There have been problems even when someone has chosen to wait for the transport van. The van often pours prisoners about six miles north, at a bus stop, the prison said. It is within the city boundaries, but still far from the homeless shelter or other places where people often try to go, and the buses only go into the early evening.
In the night of 27 February, an officer dropped a released prisoner, Chris Vigil, near a hospital, the director said. It was more than seven miles from the house where Mr. Vigil lived with his aunt.
“I don’t know what happened next,” said the director.
Mr. Vigil, 46, had spent less than 24 hours in prison because they did not come to court to face an old accusation of drinking in a park.
Not long after he was dropped, he was struck by at least one car and his body was found near an exit slope of a highway. A police report said that a station wagon and a large truck were involved in the crash and that none of the drivers had failed.
The aunt of Mr. Vigil, Barbara Ortiz, said he might not have had his glasses and that he was almost blind without them.
Mrs. Jaramillo, who was hit by the Sheriff representative in 2021, had once worked far away in a prison as a prison in a prison before he fell at harder times. She was booked in prison for entering a homeless shelter that forbade her. A police report from the crash said she had walked in the middle of a lane on the highway.
Her sister, Elizabeth Jaramillo, said she doesn’t understand why people are released so late and are allowed to walk. In an interview she and her father, Alfredo, rattled the many solutions they had come up with to make the releases safer. Among them had a representation of interests that people transported to the city, which expanded the sidewalk to prison, invoicing prisoners for a ride to their house or even giving just people reflective cardigans when they walk at night.
“It’s just astonishing for me,” she said, “that someone hasn’t understood somewhere, or has thought of a way to get it done.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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