E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Sunday, May 5, 2002
Life Sentences: BILLY POWELL, 67, Killed by a drunken driver
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque
Billy Powell was born on the plains of eastern New Mexico and fell in love with horses from the first time he was placed in a saddle. He was riding as a jockey at the racetrack in Raton as soon as he got out of high school.
Photos from the winner's circle — and there are many — show a slim, handsome man with a faint smile. He raced all over the Southwest and, at age 40, when his weight got the better of him, moved into the business of training race horses.
Eve Scolavino was a retired ballerina fresh from the American Ballet Theater in New York and was looking for a job with horses in her home town of Albuquerque when she met Powell in 1985 at the Downs at Albuquerque. She was 27 and had been hired on by some of Powell's hands to help exercise horses. It was several days later when she finally introduced herself to Powell, her new boss.
"I told those guys not to hire someone," Powell said.
"Am I fired?" she asked.
"No," he said, "you can stay."
Within a year, Powell and Scolavino were inseparable. They moved in together, and Powell began teaching Scolavino about thoroughbred horses. He gave her her first race horse, and the two traveled to races in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, breeding and racing their own horses and training horses for other owners.
"Bill was a real horseman," Scolavino said. "He understood why horses did what they did."
Powell was happiest at a racetrack, on a golf course or in the cab of a pickup on a clear day. "He loved to drive," Scolavino said.
Powell left Albuquerque early on July 19, 1997, to haul a horse to the Downs at Santa Fe. He was heading north on Interstate 25 at the Santo Domingo Pueblo exit when a car passed him, swerved into the median and back into his lane.
Jurors who convicted the 20-year-old driver of that car on vehicular homicide charges heard evidence that he had been drinking all night and was legally drunk that morning.
Powell jerked his truck to the right to avoid the car, scraped the concrete wall and could not control his truck and the 32-foot trailer he was pulling. His truck broke free and flipped.
Powell, who hated to wear a seat belt, was thrown from the truck and run over by its back tires.
Scolavino knows Powell would have been happy to have known that the horse survived.