Judge rules ex-Mora schools chief can face trial in fraud case
Former superintendent accused of submitting doctored transcripts in application for job
LAS VEGAS, N.M. — A Mora County magistrate ruled Friday that there is probable cause for former Mora Independent Schools Superintendent Charles Trujillo to stand trial on felony forgery and fraud charges.
The embattled former superintendent is accused of submitting false credentials in the spring of 2015 in order to obtain the $100,000-a-year top job in the school district that serves the rural county of about 4,600 residents.
Trujillo is accused of, among other things, submitting doctored college transcripts as part of his application for the superintendent’s job that made it look as if he has several master’s degrees, which he does not.
The case is one of three that have been filed against the 44-year-old since a scandal arose over allegations that Trujillo acquired phony licenses while working for the state Public Education Department division that issues such licenses. Trujillo resigned as superintendent a few weeks after an investigation by the Las Vegas Optic called into question his qualifications for the job, which he had acquired when his uncle, George Trujillo, then chairman of the Mora Independent School District board, cast a tie-breaking vote to offer his nephew a three-year contract.
“He seems to think the rules don’t apply to him,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Thomas Clayton said of Charles Trujillo during Friday’s preliminary hearing. “It’s one of the highest paid positions in Mora County and he thinks he can just take it because he wants it.”
Family ties continued to be a theme at Friday’s proceedings, which began with Charles Trujillo’s Albuquerque-based defense attorney, Sam Bregman, arguing that Trujillo’s mother — who hand delivered her son’s application for the superintendent job — should not be required to take the witness stand.
“The government has decided to subpoena his mother,” Bregman said. “This can only be meant in my mind to harass the family, to intimidate the family, to cause emotional trauma to the family.”
Magistrate Christopher Anthony Baca sided with Bregman on that issue. But George Trujillo’s attorney, Chico Gallegos, was not successful in arguing that his client also should not be forced to testify, because of a heart condition.
Gallegos argued that the elder Trujillo had suffered a heart attack last year and “testifying in a matter such as this would pose a credible threat that could potentially have a negative impact on his health.”
Bregman added his voice to the argument, saying: “The last thing I want to do … is have this gentleman take the stand and have a heart attack and drop dead. Over false documents? Are you kidding me?”
But Baca ruled in favor of the state after Clayton pointed out that George Trujillo — who still serves on the school board and Mora County Commission — had been well enough to partici
pate in meetings of those bodies since January.
On the stand, George Trujillo said he was close with his nephew but never had any knowledge of whether his nephew had a master’s degree. The uncle said he had relied on the school district’s human resources clerk when she said his nephew had submitted documentation that qualified him to take part in the interview portion of the hiring process.
Asked what his nephew had said during his job interview, the elder Trujillo answered: “Since my heart attack I take medication and I don’t remember a lot of things that happened in the past.”
George Trujillo also said he did not remember the circumstances of his nephew’s resignation, which occurred about four months after he was hired.
At one point, when Clayton was questioning George Trujillo about a letter that the school board — which originally stood by its hiring of Charles Trujillo — sent to the state Public Education Department acknowledging something was amiss, Gallegos tried again to get his client excused from the stand.
“I asked Mr. Trujillo to signal me if he was starting to feel sick,” Gallegos said. “This is the exact type of situation we wanted to avoid. You can see from his color,” Gallegos said, that he is not feeling well.
When the judge asked George Trujillo how he was feeling, he shrugged and said he felt “bad.”
At this juncture Bregman also asked the judge to excuse the elder Trujillo. Bregman said he was being put in the difficult position of having to ask hard questions of a man in poor health.
“I ask that this witness’s testimony be stricken from the record,” Bregman said. “He’s not feeling good.”
The judge denied the motions and Clayton continued with his questioning, reading aloud from the letter, which bore George Trujillo’s signature. In the letter, school board members expressed “deep disappointment” that Charles Trujillo had allegedly used “deceit and deception” to obtain the job via an “elaborate hoax.”
When Clayton asked George Trujillo if he agreed there had been deception or an “elaborate hoax,” George Trujillo answered, “No.”
Other witnesses who testified Friday included a former state Public Education Department employee who testified that when she and Charles Trujillo both worked in the division that issues educational credentials, a supervisor asked her to let Charles Trujillo use her pass code to the department’s internal computer system. The credentials he later submitted appeared to have been generated using her code.
A New Mexico Highlands University employee testified that Trujillo had completed coursework at the school but did not have the credits needed to qualify for a master’s degree in any of the three fields he had claimed to have such a degree.
The employee also testified that the transcripts Charles Trujillo submitted with his job application were not official transcripts and contained errors including typos, incorrect coding for classes, and math errors.
In his closing arguments, Bregman asserted that the state had presented no testimony from anyone who said they knew that Charles Trujillo forged the transcripts or issued his own educational credentials from the Public Education Department’s computer system. He suggested Trujillo’s submission of transcripts that contained errors could have been an innocent mistake.
“I understand what this all looks like,” he said. “It doesn’t look good. It looks like crap. But that’s not what the law says. The law is a sticky thing. They have to prove [forgery and fraud] with their evidence and they didn’t do it.”
Clayton countered that the state was not required to prove Charles Trujillo committed the forgery, only that he submitted documents he knew contained false information. Clayton said there was enough evidence of that, albeit circumstantial, to warrant binding the defendant over to state District Court on the charges.
“How can someone come before you and say with a straight face that he thought he had two degrees, master’s level, because the school told him he did?,” Clayton said. “That’s nonsense.”
Trujillo has also been bound over in two other cases related to similar allegations. In total he faces 19 charges in the three cases, exposing him to more than 117 years in prison and more than $130,000 in fines.
Clayton has said he may consolidate the three cases pending against Trujillo before he stands trial.