State police face lawsuit for civil rights violations

Members of Grants family claim officers held them at gunpoint, invaded home

A family from Grants is suing the state Department of Public Safety for excessive use of force, false arrest and other civil rights violations, claiming police officers searching for an escaped prisoner invaded a home and held family members — including five children — at gunpoint even though they had no connection to the escapee.

Lawyer Adam C. Flores, representing the family members, said they were victims of a massive, misguided show of police power.

“As manned and unmanned aircraft combed the skies, officers of the New Mexico State Police — some clad in olive combat fatigues and outfitted with high-powered assault rifles — drove their Ballistic Engineered Armored

Response Counter Attack Truck [“Bearcat”] through the neighborhoods of Grants conducting a house-to-house search for the escapee,” Flores wrote.

The lawsuit, filed last week in state District Court in Santa Fe, says officers entered the subdivision where Rueben Olveda was hosting a barbecue for family and friends in celebration of his 21st birthday. It was about noon on June 14, 2017, the complaint states, when officers said they decided to “shake the tree and see what falls out.”

After rousting other area residents, the complaint states, officers focused on Olveda’s home because they allegedly “saw movement” inside.

Fifteen people were in Olveda’s home. One by one, the lawsuit says, they were ordered out of the house while officers pointed guns at them, then forced them to kneel on hot rocks. Then the family members, including most of the children, were handcuffed. Officers stopped shackling the family when they ran out of cuffs, according to the lawsuit.

They frisked the family members for weapons and held them in hot patrol units for an hour or more while they ransacked the house, overturning mattresses and emptying silverware drawers, the lawsuit states.

Multiple officers trained automatic weapons on a terrified 9-year-old girl who was clutching a 6-month-old baby girl to her chest, according to the complaint.

A spokesman for the state police declined to comment on the lawsuit. It seeks damages for each of the adults and children at the home during the raid.

The plaintiffs say officers asked them almost nothing about the escapee, but ran criminal background checks on them. Their lawsuit claims officers told a 13-year-old girl she was being detained so police could investigate her immigration status, and threatened to call child protective services on a woman who returned after having left her two children at the home with seven adult family members while she went to the store.

Police finally recaptured the escaped prisoner about five days later. He had no connection to the family.

One officer later called the decision to raid the home “a wild goose chase,” the complaint says. But the suit accuses another officer of saying: “I say we do that a couple of times, and then we get their attention. And then they’ll realize, oh, these cops will take things serious.”

Other officers “minimized the incident, pretended they were never there or didn’t write a police report at all,” the lawsuit states. “State police and other officers on scene failed to preserve dash cam and belt tape recordings, thereby concealing their conduct at the scene. … By concealing their identities, failing to file police reports, failing to use [computer-aided dispatch] and failing to activate recording devices, the state police have created an unaccountable secret police force that shocks the conscience.”