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Sunday, May 5, 2002
Life Sentences: ANGELA PORTILLO, 21, Killed in Crash
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque
Angela Portillo hit her bumps in life early. A dropout from the Albuquerque Public Schools alternative School on Wheels, she was the divorced mother of two girls by the time she was 21.
But Portillo doted on her daughters, 3-year-old Evie and 1-year-old Tanya. And she was intent on making a good life for them. She got her own apartment in Albuquerque in the spring of 1998 and decorated it with sunflowers. She received her high school equivalency diploma and got a job as a security guard. Within two months she had been promoted to supervisor.
Portillo worked a night shift, and her mother, Lisa Meek, stayed with the girls after she got off work as an operating room technician.
On a rare night off in August, Portillo and two friends decided to take the girls to the fiesta in Española. Instead of Portillo taking them in her Chevy Cavalier, they decided to go in her friend's new Jeep.
They spent the evening at the fiesta and then stopped in Santa Fe and had some drinks at a relative's house. Portillo was fiercely protective of her girls, but she was drunk in the back seat of the Jeep when the group left Santa Fe and headed down Interstate 25 that night, according to Meek.
"It just took one time to put those girls in danger," Meek said. "You're not in the position to make decisions when you're so loaded."
Near La Bajada, the Jeep crossed into the highway median and rolled. All three adults were thrown from the vehicle. The children, buckled in seat belts in the back seat, were fine.
Gov. Gary Johnson and a New Mexico State Police officer came upon the crash within seconds. Johnson held Portillo, he later told her mother, and she died in his arms.
The owner of the Jeep, Denice Godinez, initially told police she was driving, then later said she was not. Her blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit, and she pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated battery for her role in the crash and was put on probation.
A cross stands at the site Portillo died, and her mother has decorated it with the wings of an angel.
"I felt like somebody ripped out my heart. Oh, God, it was the worst day of my life."