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Sunday, May 5, 2002
Life Sentences: MICHELLE JIMENEZ, 34, Belen, Killed by a drunken driver
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Michelle Jimenez was a late bloomer, but she was proving that the wait was worth it.
In 1998, Jimenez was 34, a recent college graduate with big dreams of going to medical school, then volunteering as a physician in Latin America.
She had dropped out of high school at 15 and concentrated on having babies and raising children. She had four boys, the youngest still in elementary school, when she decided it was time for her life to take on a new dimension. She enrolled in college at the University of New Mexico's Valencia County branch and encouraged her mother to do the same.
Jimenez was serious about becoming a doctor. She became a certified emergency medical technician and signed on to shadow a local doctor. Jimenez graduated with honors in May 1998.
"She just wanted to learn everything there was to learn," her stepmother, Cindy Valenzuela, said. "She turned her life around. She was going to be someone and make a difference."
Two weeks later, Jimenez was crossing the street in the crosswalk in downtown Los Lunas about 2:30 p.m. when a pickup, running a red light, hit her. She bounced onto the pickup's hood and rolled off. The driver kept on going.
Jimenez died instantly. The pickup driver, Daniel F. Gonzales, turned onto a ditchbank. Witnesses found him there throwing beer cans out of his truck.
As part of a plea agreement that cut his prison sentence to 14 years, Gonzales, a 38-year-old with seven DWI convictions, agreed to detail his activities on the day Jimenez died.
He had gotten off work in Albuquerque at 7 a.m. and started drinking beer with friends, he said in a statement. They bought a case of beer in Albuquerque, played basketball, watched TV and drank some more, he said. Then he got in his truck to drive home.
He did not remember hitting Jimenez.
"I was so exhausted from working and drinking beer," Gonzales wrote. "I could hardly stay awake. Next thing I know, I heard this noise. I'm thinking, and saying to myself, 'Oh, no. What have I done? Something isn't right.' ''
"Alcohol is the reason we're in business."
"This wasn't going to happen to us. This was something that was in the newspapers happening to other people."