Man accused in teen’s death to remain jailed in separate case
Defense attorneys make no effort to argue for Ferguson’s release as court weighs probation violation
Defense attorneys for Thomas Wayne Ferguson, who is accused of killing a 13-year-old boy in Nambé late last year, did not even attempt to argue Tuesday that he should be released from jail while a separate case against him is pending.
During a state District Court hearing to determine whether Ferguson is too dangerous to be allowed to post bond as the probation-violation case proceeds, his attorneys, Tom Clark and Michael Jones, told the judge they already had informed Chief Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Padgett and Deputy District Attorney Michael Nuñez that they would not seek to have Ferguson released.
Ferguson, 43, is accused of beating his girlfriend’s son, Jeremiah Valencia, to death and then forcing the boy’s mother, Tracy Ann Peña, 35, and Ferguson’s son, Jordan Anthony Nuñez, 19, to help him bury the child’s body off N.M. 503 near Nambé in November.
Ferguson, Peña and Nuñez are all charged with child abuse resulting in death, tampering with evidence and conspiracy to commit tampering with evidence in the case. Michael Nuñez and Jordan Nuñez are not related.
Ferguson and Peña were both in jail on probation violations when the Santa Fe County Sheriff ’s Office announced Jan. 29 that they had been arrested in connection with the death of the child, whose remains had just been unearthed.
At the time, Jordan Nuñez was living in a motel with Peña’s 13-year-old daughter in the adults’ absence.
District Attorney Marco Serna has said Jeremiah was not reported missing in the two months following his death. Court documents say the sheriff ’s office began investigating after receiving a tip from a jail inmate who had heard Peña speak of her son’s slaying.
Because Ferguson was on probation at the time of Jeremiah’s death, he has two court cases currently pending against him, one for violating the terms of his probation and another for the death.
Tuesday’s hearing, in First District Judge T. Glenn Ellington’s courtroom in Santa Fe, was in relation to an alleged violation of Ferguson’s
probation in a 2014 case in which he was convicted of holding a woman, his girlfriend at the time, hostage in his home for four days and battering her. He also had been charged with raping the woman, but that charge was dropped as part of his plea deal.
Ellington in 2015 sentenced Ferguson to nine years in prison and five years of probation in the kidnapping case, but he then suspended all but about a year of that time.
The following year, the District Attorney’s Office moved to have Ferguson’s probation revoked because probation officers conducting a check on him at a home in Rio Rancho reported they had been greeted at the door by a woman who appeared to have been battered.
Instead of sending Ferguson to prison, however, Ellington reinstated his probation.
Ferguson wasn’t classified as probation absconder until August 2017, after several months of failing to report to his probation officer, according to court records. He wasn’t captured until Jan. 17. Ellington had no words of reprimand for Ferguson when he appeared in court on the probation violation in 2016, and the judge said almost nothing to him Tuesday, when Ferguson appeared in court wearing a red jumpsuit and shackles.
Ferguson sat stoically behind the defense table, staring straight ahead or down and said nothing — aside from “Yes, sir,” in response to a question from Ellington about whether he understood his rights.
Jones said Ferguson entered a plea of not guilty to the charges stemming from Jeremiah’s death during an arraignment by telephone last week. The Santa Fe County Magistrate Court did not address the issue of whether Ferguson could be released from jail as he awaits his trial in the child abuse case because state prosecutors’ motion seeking to have him held without bond in the probation violation case already was scheduled.
Ferguson has said Jeremiah was injured while roughhousing with his siblings. He tucked the boy into bed under a blanket, he said, but later found Jeremiah dead and buried his body out of fear that he would be accused of killing the child, according to court documents.
Nuñez and Peña have described a different series of events.
Peña told police she had spent a couple of days in jail in November for failing to appear in court in a drug possession case. She said she returned home to find her son’s lifeless body wrapped in a blanket on his bed, court records say.
She first told police that Ferguson had disposed of the child’s body, but she later admitted she had watched Ferguson wrap her son’s body in plastic and place it in a storage container. She led police to the area where her son’s body was buried, according to documents.
Nuñez initially denied having any knowledge of Jeremiah’s death.
But he later told investigators that in the weeks leading to Jeremiah’s death, Ferguson had beaten Jeremiah several times with brass knuckles, a cane, a hammer and a homemade spear, and that Ferguson had locked the boy in a dog cage and forced him to wear adult diapers.
Both Peña and Nuñez told investigators they had remained silent about what happened to Jeremiah because they were terrified of Ferguson, who has a long history of domestic violence, including a 2003 conviction for choking, beating and kicking his wife while she held their 8-month-old daughter.
Hearings to consider whether Peña and Nuñez should be held in jail without bond pending the outcome of the case are scheduled Wednesday in front of District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer.
Staff writer Sami Edge contributed to this report.
Contact Phaedra Haywood at 505-986-3068 or phaywood@ sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @phaedraann.