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Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Widow Says Police Were Negligent
By Scott Sandlin
Journal Staff Writer
Negligent policing is at the heart of a civil lawsuit filed by a woman whose husband, nurse Scott Pierce, was shot by a serial killer in June 2008, just six days after the couple wed.
Despite abundant evidence that the suspects police had in custody weren't the killers, the widow claims failure to apprehend the true murderer, Clifton Bloomfield, allowed him to be free and to kill again.
After his arrest, police said Bloomfield and co-defendant Jason Skaggs planned to kill another man who'd lived in the home before the Pierces moved in.
Katherine Pierce's wrongful death lawsuit was filed in 2nd Judicial District court by attorney Brad Hall last month.
Hall earlier had served a tort claim notice on other officials, including the district attorney, mayor, jail director and state corrections secretary, but the complaint names as defendants the city and Detectives Kevin Morant, Michael Fox and Carl Ross, Sgts. Carlos Argueta and Todd Hudson and Chief Ray Schultz, all of the Albuquerque Police Department.
Deputy City Attorney Kathryn Levy said Wednesday that she has not yet seen the lawsuit. But, she said, "Obviously, Mr. Pierce's death was a terrible tragedy, but nothing APD detectives did could have prevented it."
Bloomfield, 40, eventually admitted to the murder of Scott Pierce as well the murders of Tak and Pung Yi, but not before police had wrung a false confession from a young door-to-door magazine salesman in the Yi case, says the wrongful death lawsuit.
"The killer was at large, on probation, in part because of the negligence of defendants in not 'connecting the dots' and doing their jobs in the investigation of crimes that occurred months and years before (Scott Pierce) was killed," the lawsuit contends.
At the time Bloomfield and Skaggs entered the Yi home on Dec. 3, 2007, Bloomfield was on probation for a violent crime committed two years earlier and had been in and out of jail throughout his life. Bloomfield's DNA profile should have been accessible in databases in New Mexico, Arizona and the federal criminal justice system, according to the suit.
Meanwhile, magazine salesmen Travis Rowley and Michael Lee, who were making sales calls miles away from the Yi home on the day of the murders, were arrested and charged with killing the Yis.
Katherine Pierce's lawsuit alleges police failed to conduct a competent investigation because they claimed Rowley had confessed.
But Rowley's statements didn't match up with the physical evidence at the crime scene, according to the lawsuit.
"Detectives did no corroboration investigation of the inconsistent details in the police-induced false confession," the lawsuit contends. "Perhaps worse yet, no supervisors required corroborative investigative work."
A closer look at the way the magazine sales company, Integrity, operated in the field should have raised questions about the salesmen's arrests, the complaint alleges.
Bloomfield's DNA was found under Tak Yi's fingernail, while none of the DNA collected from the magazine salesmen was found at the murder scene, according to the lawsuit.
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