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Monday, June 15, 2009
Police Chief Talks of Tough Spring in Albuquerque
By Heather Clark
Associated Press
Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz remembers the moment at a news conference when his voice choked up and his eyes filled with tears.
In a subdued tone, he told the nation last month that a mother had suffocated her 3-year-old son and buried him in a city playground. Schultz then noticed his detectives, watching him from behind the row of television cameras.
"One of the toughest things for me," he recalled, "was looking back at the news conference, at the back of the room, and seeing my detectives all with watered-up eyes."
It's been a hard year for Albuquerque.
Two crime stories — Ty Toribio's death allegedly at the hands of his mother, Tiffany, and the discovery in February of 11 bodies and a fetus buried in a subdivision site on a desert mesa — have repeatedly thrust New Mexico's largest city into the national spotlight this year.
The 27-year Albuquerque police veteran said "a feeling of sadness" has settled over the fast-growing city of nearly 500,000 people.
After another tragic incident — the drowning death of a teenage boy in the Rio Grande in May — Schultz said he was stopped by countless people who wanted to talk about the fragility of life, and how quickly a tragedy can take over.
"It has been a tough spring on everybody," he said.
Candlelight vigils have been held for the women found in the desert, and families who are still waiting to see if their daughters or mothers are among the victims joined them. Mourners piled toys, candles and flowers at a makeshift memorial near the play structure where Ty Toribio's body was found.
Mindful of the boy's family, Schultz sat alone in his office before the news conference. He wrote down key phrases he'd use, and wondered about how the family would remember his words.
"If I was the family, what would I want to hear?" Schultz said he asked himself. "Don't go into the gory details, but at the same time, what do I need to tell the community so the community can kind of rest easy?"
Schultz has dealt with big crime news before. Weeks after he came out of retirement in Scottsdale, Ariz., to become Albuquerque's chief, the so-called Runaway Bride — Jennifer Wilbanks — fled to the city just before her wedding.
Schultz said he received 1,200 e-mails from people wanting to praise and criticize him for how he treated Wilbanks, who pleaded no contest to telling authorities a phony story and served two years' probation.
The e-mails he's received about the remains uncovered in February by a hiker at a 92-acre site that had been bulldozed for a residential subdivision are more somber. Some are from as far away as France, and many are from parents desperately searching for their missing children. Schultz said he answers them himself.
Four sets of remains are unidentified, but the other seven belonged to women reported missing between 2001 and 2006. The women had a history of prostitution and many struggled with drug addiction before they disappeared in 2003-2004, police say.
Law enforcement agencies are paying attention to how the department, which has created a multiagency task force, investigates the case, Schultz said. He hopes that out of the tragedy can come lessons for other law enforcement agencies.
So far, police say they have found no links with crimes elsewhere and the suspect list continues to fluctuate as they follow up on tips.
Schultz said one of the main questions is why the crimes came to a halt several years ago.
"These all happened between 2000 and 2005 and they seem to have stopped in 2005. What happened? Is your offender somewhere else, doing this somewhere else now? Is he dead? Is he incarcerated? ... Did he get married and have kids and change his lifestyle?" he asked.
Schultz has had to balance getting information out nationally to try to catch a suspect — America's Most Wanted filmed a segment on the crime at the burial site, for example. But he doesn't want to paint a portrait of Albuquerque that's too bleak.
Violent crime, including murders and robberies, in the city dropped from 2007 to 2008, just as such crimes declined nationally, according to FBI statistics.
"You have to be careful because you don't want it to look like, 'Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling,"' he said.
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