Attorney seeks to represent beaten, slain boy in suit

Attorneys Joleen Youngers and Frances Carpenter are petitioning the First Judicial District Court to appoint Youngers the personal representative of the estate of a boy beaten to death in Nambé, saying they’re considering a wrongful death lawsuit filed on the boy’s behalf.

The request centers on 13-year-old Jeremiah Valencia, who police believe was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend, Thomas Ferguson, last year in Nambé and buried along a roadside. As the story of Jeremiah’s slaying unfolded, it came to light that there were numerous points at which the death might have been prevented if public officials had taken action.

Carpenter said the aim of the lawsuit is to address those systemic failures.

“The main goal for us is not a lawsuit which results in monetary benefit as much as looking at all the ways that we can stop this from happening in the future, whether that means by legisla-

tion or suit,” Carpenter said.

Santa Fe County sheriff ’s deputies unearthed Jeremiah’s burned and abused body in January, after an inmate at the county jail told officials his mother — also an inmate at the time — had spoken about Ferguson forcing her to move her son’s remains.

Tracy Ann Peña said she’d kept quiet because about her son’s death because she was afraid of Ferguson.

Ferguson, who took his own life in April in a jail cell, was on probation for another crime when he allegedly beat Jeremiah to death in November. He had been convicted in a 2014 case of holding a woman, his girlfriend at the time, hostage in his home for four days and battering her.

State District Judge T. Glenn Ellington had sentenced to Ferguson to nine years in prison but suspended all but about a year of that time and instead allowed him to serve probation.

In 2016, the District Attorney’s Office sought to have Ferguson’s probation revoked because probation officers conducting a check on him at home in Rio Rancho reported concerns that he had battered a woman there, which would violate the terms of his probation.

Instead of revoking Ferguson’s probation and imprisoning him, however, Ellington approved a plea deal that allowed Ferguson to continue serving probation.

Ferguson later was convicted in Sandoval County of a battery charge tied to the Rio Rancho incident — which also could have led to revocation of his probation and led to prison time — but District Attorney Marco Serna later said his office wasn’t aware of that.

Ferguson eventually failed to report to his probation officer, another violation.

Two probation officers went to his home in Nambé to check on him about a week before Jeremiah died, but they left without speaking with him. They reported that “there were several large dogs in the yard, the gate was locked and there was a beware of dog sign on the fence.”

Jeremiah had stopped going to school about nine months before his death, but officials at two districts where he previously had attended school — Las Vegas, N.M., and Santa Fe — didn’t make attempts to track down the boy. State education officials have said efforts to track children who aren’t enrolled in school isn’t their responsibility.

Years earlier, concerns were raised about Jeremiah’s well-being, and child welfare officials investigated. But after a court placed the boy in the guardianship of his grandfather, the Children, Youth and Families Department had no more contact with him.

Carpenter declined to comment on which agencies might be the target of any possible wrongful death suit, but she said she and Youngers are “preserving the claim” and reviewing 20,000 pages of documents they’ve gathered on the case.

“To say that I’m disappointed in how the District Attorney’s Office or Probation and Parole handled this matter is an understatement,” Carpenter said.

According to the petition, Jeremiah’s father, Andrew Valencia, is a state prison inmate. His mother, still held in the Santa Fe County jail, is awaiting trial on felony child abuse charges in relation to her son’s death.

Carpenter said that if a financial settlement were reached in the case, Jeremiah’s 13-year-old sister could be a possible beneficiary.

Carpenter, a civil rights attorney, represented the family of Kenneth Ellis, who was fatally shot by an Albuquerque police officer in 2010.

The suit resulted in a settlement in which the department agreed to pay the Ellis family several million dollars. But Carpenter said it also resulted in a law that requires all law enforcement officers in New Mexico to complete a minimum amount of crisis intervention training.

She could see policy changes being a part of a resolution in Jeremiah’s case as well, she said.