‘Deputy’ badge a relic of prison riot good deed
She found the star tucked away in her old jewelry box, where she had put it when she was 5. Her father had given it to her for reasons even now she does not understand. It was one of the few things he had ever given her.
“I believe he was in and out of prison all of my life,” Jennifer Martin said. “I never knew much about him.”
Her father, Alton Martin, has been dead and gone for about 20 years — so long ago that most criminal and prison records of him are not accessible in online archives, save for a mention of an escape attempt at the Chaves County jail in 1978 in which a guard was overtaken but the bars and metal vents were not.
Old letters he wrote her when she was a child are postmarked from the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe, one clue that he had served
time there.
The star — tarnished brass, six points, ball-tipped — is another clue.
Though the etchings on the star are mostly worn away, the words “Santa Fe Deputy New Mexico” are still discernible.
“It’s just strange to me that he would give me that,” she said.
She hadn’t thought about that star until recently, when she was going through some boxes of old items from her family home and found the jewelry box. Also among the items was a tattered article torn from a magazine that her mother had shown her when she was 12 or 13.
“I read it now from beginning to end,” she said.
The article was about the February 1980 prison riots at the penitentiary, a gruesome 36 hours when inmates soused on raisin jack and seething over their living conditions rained hell upon the prison. When the smoke cleared, 33 inmates were dead — tortured, raped, burned by blowtorches, dismembered and mutilated.
Fourteen corrections officers were taken hostage, most of them stripped, blindfolded and beaten.
One of the officers was Herman Gallegos, a 50-year-old Santa Fe man who had spent more than half his life employed at the prison.
In “The Devil’s Butcher Shop,” a book written about the riots by Roger Morris, Gallegos is described as a “congenial veteran” and an “older, more benign guard” whose decency toward the inmates likely saved him from the humiliation and abuse his colleagues endured as hostages.
Gallegos was able to slip into a day room, where he hid for nearly four hours, surrounded by sympathetic inmates.
“They offered me coffee and tea,” he told a Journal reporter in 1982. “Coffee and tea and something to eat and all that. They were not doing anything else but protecting me and comforting me.”
Inmates helped Gallegos escape by dressing him in a prisoner uniform and escorting him through the bloody, burning penitentiary.
One of those inmates was Alton Martin.
Because of his actions that day, Martin and several other inmates had their sentences reduced. The star was a gift of gratitude from Gallegos to Martin.
At least that is what Jennifer Martin said she was told. Records and news accounts do not mention Alton Martin, the reduced sentence or the star.
“I feel like there’s a lot more to the story,” she said. “I want to know more about why my dad was let out. I want to get to the truth.”
And she wants to return the star to its rightful owner.
“I feel like that’s the right thing to do,” she said.
But Gallegos died in October 2012 at age 82. A year later, then-state Department of Corrections Secretary Gregg Marcantel righted a longneglected wrong by honoring the officers who were on duty when the riot began with the prestigious Medal of Honor. Gallegos was among the seven officers whose families could not be found by the Corrections folks.
But Priscilla Melgar, one of Gallegos’ two daughters, found them.
And I found her.
She was 12, she told me, when the riot occurred, and she remembers the stories — how the inmates saved her father, how they were shown mercy for their actions with parole, how her father had given them a token of his appreciation, though she never knew what that token looked like.
“My father helped the prisoners in every way he could, so in turn, they protected him,” the Pecos woman said. “He really believed in them. They respected him. He helped many of them turn their lives around. He treated them like humans.”
But she also remembers the years after that, how her beloved father could never go back to the job he had once loved, how he screamed in the night, haunted by the memories of the evil that had descended upon Old Main.
“He was just a country boy from Nambé, but that night changed him,” she said. “It traumatized him.”
Melgar received the Medal of Honor on behalf of her father in May 2014. Soon, she expects to accept the tarnished star from Jennifer Martin. Such stars, she said, used to be given to the officers many years ago.
“This is so unexpected, so wonderful,” she said. “I’m so grateful to get the chance to have this piece of my father.”
The two women have already exchanged emails. Jennifer Martin said she hopes to deliver the star to Gallegos’ family soon. And she wonders whether her father’s actions were worthy of being given the gift of that star nearly 40 years ago.
“My dad never deserved that,” Jennifer Martin said. “It’s like everybody thinks he did a good thing. But doing what he did doesn’t make you a good person. It makes you normal.” UpFront is a front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 8233603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www. abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.