Attorney dedicates career to missing and murdered Native Americans

Her name was Melissa Montoya.

An enrolled member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, she was last seen at a Saint Patrick’s Day Party at a local bar in Dulce, New Mexico. Nearly 24 years later, Montoya’s childhood friend Darlene Gomez is still searching for her.

Montoya’s 2001 disappearance set Gomez on a journey, not only to find her friend, but to bring justice to other Native American families with missing and murdered loved ones. As an attorney, Gomez has represented dozens of families pro-bono, secured convictions and helped uncover bodies — providing an estimated $3.3 million in pro-bono legal services.

According to the Indian Affairs department, there are no reliable counts for how many Indigenous people go missing each year, despite Native Americans experiencing much higher rates of violence than the national average. Native people had the second-highest rate of being victims of homicide of all racial groups in 2020. This combination of underreporting and high rates of violence is called the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis by both activists, the state and federal government.

New Mexico in particular has the highest rate of MMIP in the nation despite having the fifth-largest Native population in the country, according to findings from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Task Force. Among urban centers, New Mexico has two cities in the top ten— with Albuquerque having the second-highest rate of missing or murdered Indigenous women of the cities surveyed and Gallup ranking sixth.

A childhood idol

As a child, Gomez was a self-described tomboy with crooked teeth, cowboy boots and a clipped haircut. She looked up to Montoya and would follow her around the Gomez family’s convenience store, babbling off questions. Montoya was reserved, but tough as nails, Gomez said: Montoya grew up in a household without running water, standing tall despite constant schoolyard bullying about her family’s poverty.

Montoya was 42 when she went missing. At that point the girls had both grown up and their paths diverged. While Gomez went away to law school — Montoya stayed, living on a ranch near the New Mexico-Colorado border with a boyfriend who Gomez claims was abusive. “Eventually she knew that he was probably going to kill her,” Gomez said. “But she felt like she had no way to get out.”

Though Montoya’s body has never been found, she is presumed dead. If she were alive today, she’d be 66 years old. Her case has sat dormant for nearly 24 years: with no body, no arrests and seemingly no leads. This case follows a national trend all too familiar to Native communities.

But her disappearance did change Gomez’s life. While still in law school, she became an advocate. A lawyer now, she does more than just represent families in the courtroom. “I’m a fundraiser, I’m a press release packet maker, I’m a therapist, I’m an attorney, I’m an activist, I’m a policymaker,” Gomez said. “And it just goes on and on.”

A single mother, Gomez has missed holidays and birthdays with her son to organize rallies, go on searches and speak at MMIP task force meetings. She dedicates 30 hours a week to helping these families, on top of her other cases. Right now, Gomez actively represents 19 families from the Navajo Nation to Jemez Pueblo. When talking about her clients, Gomez always calls them “her family.”

Out of the 28 families Gomez has represented pro-bono in her career, she’s secured three convictions and a manslaughter plea. Having any kind of resolution to a case is few and far between. Many MMIP cases go unsolved, according to the Indian Affairs Department, and most never make it to trial.

To address this crisis, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham established the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMWR) Task Force through an executive order in 2021. Gomez was a member of the MMWR Task Force before it was quietly disbanded by the governor last year. When the task force was reestablished by the legislature in March under the purview of the Department of Justice, Gomez, and many other members, were not invited back.

Since March, the new task force has met twice, in meetings closed to the community save for an hour-long public comment period that Gomez said is insufficient given the severity of the crisis. The previous task force met monthly, with subcommittees often convening multiple times. This new task force will meet four times in the new year, Department of Justice spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez told the Journal in an email. Rodriguez attributed the initial delay in meetings to a “thoughtful” selection process for task force members that ultimately took eight months.

A break in the case?

Just a few months after the governor’s task force was disbanded, an email wound up in Gomez’s inbox that would upend her life. Police might have found Montoya’s body — nearly four years ago. That’s what a woman who’d been scanning the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System Database (NamUs) wrote to Gomez.

On a summer’s day in June of 2020, a group driving down a dirt road outside of Dulce, New Mexico, noticed a human skull and other skeletal remains, according to a report in the NamUs. Jicarilla Apache Police Department officers were called to the scene, but the remains weren’t filed in the national database for three years.

The bones, which were said to belong to an American Indian female between 30 and 60 years old, matched Montoya’s description and were found in her own hometown. This was the first lead in Montoya’s case in years, and Gomez jumped on it.

“So for six weeks, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat.” Gomez said. “I was constantly calling everyone because of all the different law enforcement agencies and the Office of the Medical Examiner, and then the governor’s office.”

But it wasn’t Montoya. The bones were misclassified as belonging to a woman and nearly two years after their discovery, tests found the remains belonged to a male — the report was incorrect on NamUs until late December. Gomez was crushed, she said, and burnt out to come to yet another dead end.

The incorrect NamUs entry was online for nearly two years after results came back, according to a case summary file shared with the Journal by the Office of the Medical Investigator. When asked by the Journal about the mistake, Office of the Medical Investigator Chief Dr. Heather Jarrell initially said in a statement that OMI didn’t currently have permission to edit the case file on NamUs. The next day, Dr. Jarrell told the Journal that OMI staff had updated the report. The Office of the Medical Investigator is listed as the case owner on NamUs.

In November, after Dateline NBC featured Montoya’s story, Gomez managed to arrange a search on the ranch where Montoya lived with the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office.

They found nothing, which is what Gomez has come to expect, but she’s far from giving up.

“I grew up right near Dulce,” Gomez said. “My parents grew up there. My great grandparents grew up there. So it’s knowing that if I don’t continue to work on MMIP, that it could be my nieces and nephews who go missing or are murdered, my cousins who go missing and murdered.”

“I think the Creator,” Gomez continued. “I think God put me in this place to do this work.”