Copyright © 2021 Albuquerque Journal
Albuquerque police have identified three people killed this month.
Gilbert Gallegos, an Albuquerque Police Department spokesman, said Jerome Lucero, 31, was found dead from a gunshot wound in the parking lot of a strip mall on Central by Atrisco on Nov. 2.
An employee was cleaning the parking lot early that morning when he saw Lucero’s body on the ground. He tried to wake him, but then realized he was dead.
Five days later, on Nov. 7, Martesse Patterson, 26, was killed and another person was critically injured outside a market on East Central, near Dallas. It was the 100th homicide in city limits, although three of those were investigated by New Mexico State Police.
On Nov. 18, Brandi Rael, 30, was found shot to death in a car in the parking lot of the Copper Ridge Apartments on Tramway near Copper NE. Police said a passerby had spotted the car, and Rael inside, around 8 a.m. and called 911.
No arrests have been made in any of the cases.
The Albuquerque Journal counts homicides using the same guidelines laid out in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The FBI asks law enforcement agencies to count homicides based on what the investigation found, not the determination of the Office of the Medical Investigator. Therefore, the Journal doesn’t include justifiable homicides, vehicular homicides and others that are not the willful, nonnegligent killing of one person by another.
