Burned Woman Dies, Months Later

For seven months, Genevieve Fay lay in a hospital bed in the burn unit of the University of New Mexico Hospital, enduring multiple skin grafts, surgeries, pneumonia and respiratory problems stemming from burned flesh over 90 percent of her body.

She died on Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, charges against her former boyfriend changed from attempted murder and aggravated arson to first-degree murder.

Police reports say Fay, 49, sustained the burns when Clarence Ray Pergeson, 54, poured gasoline on her while she was in her black Chevy Cavalier and set it on fire on June 20. She was leaving for work from her home in an apartment complex on Fourth Street NW.

A series of small explosions erupted in the car before another resident, her cousin, was able to grab a blanket and wrap her in it after he heard screaming outside.

“Ray did it! Ray did it!” she yelled then, and later, when Fay finally was able to speak again in October, to the nursing staff at the hospital.

The incident came at the end of a series of episodes involving Pergeson, who had been charged months earlier in Metropolitan Court with stalking.

Fay and Pergeson had lived together for three years starting in 2003 and had been on-again, off-again friends after that, according to investigative reports. But Pergeson’s insistence on seeing Fay when she didn’t want to see him led to hair-raising encounters.

He managed to get her restricted phone number and called continually. In a February 2012 police report, she showed an officer a two-page call history and said Pergeson had been going by her workplace and her mother’s home. He had tried to pull her from her car at the intersection of Fourth and Alameda NW.

In May 2011, he had tried to block her vehicle from leaving a gas station. When she managed to maneuver around him, he began following her in his vehicle so aggressively that an unknown motorcycle rider intervened and confronted him.

In January 2012, he showed up at Fay’s daughter’s home, banging on the door and demanding Fay come out.

The next month, he followed her as she drove south from Bernalillo with a male friend, signaling her to stop.

Pergeson was charged in a criminal complaint with stalking. The arson and gasoline fire occurred while that case was pending.

County officials got a call about a white Chevrolet truck that had hit a guard rail, and a man was seen getting a mountain bike out of the truck bed. The man, who witnesses said appeared incoherent and injured, had burns on his hands and arms as he rode west, abandoning his truck. Pergeson spent two weeks in the burn unit before being discharged to jail.

A deputy who had Pergeson’s truck towed away found gas cans in the truck bed and a cell phone inside.

An officer who escorted Pergeson to UNMH by ambulance five days after the incident said Pergeson told him, “Nobody believes my side of the story. She poured gas on me, and then lit the match,” before he fell asleep.
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal