Sheriff’s office has better safety in light of 2009 Harris shooting

The Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office may be a safer place to work these days.

That’s according to Lt. Keith Elder, of the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office, who said the department’s current sheriff and undersheriff have changed the way deputies do business since an incident involving Theresa Moriarty — who recently had a lawsuit against the department thrown out of court.

The lawsuit follows a stakeout that went wrong and resulted in the death of a sheriff’s deputy in 2009.

In July of 2009, Moriarty, a former deputy, saw her friend and supervisor killed by the so-called “Cookie Bandit” in a Jemez-area cabin and filed a claim in 2011.

Senior U.S. District Judge James A. Parker threw the claims out and, in a 54-page opinion, sent the case back to the state District Court for trial on state tort and contract claims.

Moriarty alleges that her administrators at the time — Sheriff John Paul Trujillo, Undersheriff Tim Lucero and Capt. Edd Morrison — put her in unnecessary danger by failing to warn her or Sgt. Joe Harris of the threat posed by the “Cookie Bandit,” a man later identified to be Joseph Henry Burgess, 62.

It was later discovered that Burgess had murdered a young couple in British Columbia in 1972, according to Canadian officials, and was a suspect in a 2004 California homicide as well.

During Moriarty’s 2009 stakeout, Burgess broke into the cabin and attacked Harris and Moriarty. Burgess was subdued, but in the aftermath of the scuffle, Burgess was killed and Harris was shot in the femoral artery.

It was more than an hour before emergency personnel arrived, and Harris died in an Albuquerque hospital.

In her complaint, Moriarty claims she lacked adequate training, backup and equipment, such as bulletproof vests or functional radios.

Since that time, the office addressed many of the complaints in Moriarty’s lawsuit, Elder said. He said the current leadership — Sheriff Douglas Wood, Undersheriff Karl Wiese and Capt. Michael Traxler — made some of those changes as a direct response to issues that arose during the 2009 incident at the cabin in Jemez.

Deputies’ vehicles are now equipped with repeaters, which amplify the capabilities of officers’ hand-held radios. That’s especially important in the remote parts of the county, like the situation Moriarty was in, he said.

That communications equipment is vital and could mean a faster medical response for deputies who are injured in the field.

“Not everything (Moriarty) was saying was getting to dispatch,” Elder said.

Deputies are also given medical training and the office has improved the review process for operations as well, he said. Before every operation, a supervisor writes out a tactical plan and that plan is then sent up the food chain for review, he said.

“The undersheriff, at a minimum, is notified,” he said. “There’s none of this, ‘Well, I didn’t know we were doing that.’”

In addition, deputies and their supervisors hold a meeting after the operation is completed to review what was done well and identify problems and come up with solutions.

Despite those changes, Elder said there is an inherent danger in the job.

“There’s no guarantee that when we go to work today that our last call won’t be our last call,” he said. “There are things that we do that are absolutely dangerous. We do what we can to minimize those dangers to the officers and to the deputies. But when the call comes in, it is a call we have to answer, because we’re charged with protection of life and property.”

(Albuquerque Journal news staff contributed to this report.)