‘How are we going to restore that trust?’
Deputy police chief takes over evidence room where failures helped derail murder case
“I’m already a dead man. No doubt about it. I’m a dead man. So am I either going to sit here and mope about it, or am I going to go out there and do the best job I can? And if I die, I die on my feet, rather than as a coward.”
Those thoughts laid heavy on the mind of 21-year-old Ben Valdez in 2004 as he awoke in a U.S. Marines barracks in Fallujah, Iraq, on his only deployment overseas. He listened to enemy mortars explode closer and closer and wondered whether it was worth it to get out of his rack.
He chose to stand up. And fifteen years later, Valdez reflects on that decision as he navigates a less dangerous — but still crucial — role within the Santa Fe Police Department.
In June, the department acknowledged several pieces of evidence in the 2017 fatal stabbing of Selena Valencia had gone missing. Valencia’s former boyfriend, Christopher Garcia, who was accused of killing her in the couple’s apartment, was set to stand trial on a charge of first-degree murder. But the proceedings were halted as missing evidence had prompted a court-ordered independent audit of the remaining evidence in the case.
The audit report, released in late-September, found the police department had failed to follow its policies on evidence handling, storage and tracking in the Valencia case, and had failed to conduct regular audits and inspections of its evidence room.
Last week, prosecutors agreed to allow
Garcia to plead no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter and serve a 12-year prison sentence, acknowledging during a court hearing that “the evidence issues made the risk of going to trial substantial.”
As the controversy over the evidence room unfolded, Valdez, one of two deputy chiefs, was assigned to help fix its systemic problems, though officials insist they have not uncovered any other cases affected by missing evidence.
“The big thing right now is … how are we going to restore that trust?” Valdez says. “Trust is something that is earned, it’s not given.”
Valdez, 36, does not seem intimidated by the prospect of dealing with the uncertainties stemming from the evidence room, in part because he has seen far more than most — from the streets of Santa Fe, where he served as a patrol officer for four years, to the rubble of the Iraq War, where he once led a small team of Marines in combat.
He says his journey began as a junior at Pojoaque Valley High, when he decided he would enlist in the Marine Corps.
He never anticipated the stakes would be so high.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Valdez and a group of other Marines took off from the airport in Albuquerque, headed for infantry training at Camp Pendleton near San Diego. They made a stop in Phoenix, and the tragic news of the morning was on TV.
“That’s when the first plane hit,” Valdez says of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. “Then we saw the second plane hit, and we were like, ‘What the heck is going on?’
“It shook you,” he adds, “to see that type of evil.”
After two or three days in Phoenix — almost no aircraft were allowed to fly in the days following 9/11 — the Marines were finally put on a plane to San Diego.
“That kind of set the stage for my career,” he says.
His choice to go into the Marines’ security forces meant extensive antiterrorism training and membership in a “close-quarters battle platoon” specializing in rescue missions and hostage situations.
“It was intense training,” Valdez recalls. “I met a lot of good people in my time, served with people that I call giants — heroes, true heroes — because of what they did.”
In the late summer of 2004, Valdez found himself in the cauldron of Fallujah, where U.S. forces were locked in fierce battles with insurgents. He said he and his squad participated in many patrols in an attempt to stabilize a major roadway, plus clear buildings and eradicate terrorist cells.
At one point, Valdez was wounded by shrapnel, for which he received a Purple Heart.
“This was no joke,” he says of the 2004-05 time period in Iraq. “This when it was full-on out.”
He says the experience galvanized his view on life, death and service. It also taught him to respect the culture of an area.
“My start with community policing,” he says, “started on the streets of Fallujah.”
But it may have started long before that.
Valdez was born at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital on Cerrillos Road and grew up in Pojoaque Pueblo. He was raised, along with three siblings, by a single mother after their parents divorced when he was in the second grade.
His mother, Annette Hooper, served as a officer with the Pojoaque and Santa Clara pueblo police departments. She also was a Santa Fe police dispatcher and at one point the chief of the Pojoaque police department.
The roots in police work go even wider. Valdez’s father, Manuel Valdez, retired as a lieutenant for the Rio Arriba County Sheriff ’s Office, and his mother’s father was the first tribal sheriff in Pojoaque Pueblo. Valdez says his grandfather, also named Ben, and his grandmother, Flora, both of whom helped raise him, were major influences.
“So my family is really big on serving the community, and contributing to the community, so that’s kind of where I got my early inspiration,” he says.
Upon returning from Iraq, Valdez was hired by the Santa Fe Police Department in 2005 and got married the same year.
He was the valedictorian of his academy class and his career path rose from there, from patrolman to field training officer, plus several iterations as a detective investigating narcotics, gangs and homicides. He was named captain before becoming deputy chief in 2018.
Valdez, who lives Albuquerque, prefers not to discuss his family, alluding to dangerous criminals he has arrested.
“I’ve put people in prison,” he says. “I’ve been on some pretty serious cases.”
One of them occurred in 2017, when Valdez was among the on-scene commanders during the fatal police shooting of Anthony Benavidez. Valdez sent in SWAT team members to smash Benavidez’s window to “open up other options” in order to stop Benavidez’s “ongoing deadly behavior,” according to a New Mexican story at the time. The 24-year-old Benavidez, who had schizophrenia, had barricaded himself inside his apartment after injuring his social worker with a knife. He threw two homemade devices at officers that did not injure anyone. Two SWAT officers fired 17 shots through a window at Benavidez, who was said to be holding a knife. The two officers remain on active duty.
Valdez says he cannot comment on the case because an internal affairs investigation remains active.
After becoming deputy chief, Valdez was named deputy chief of operations, which gave him a role in dealing with the public and handling media calls on breaking incidents. His role in recent weeks has changed upon his appointment as deputy chief of administration, but he says the department’s reputation and its ability to be seen and heard by the public are key.
“One thing that we saw with law enforcement for the longest time was their canned response was ‘No comment,’ or this or that, and, we are a public entity,” he says. “We’re here to protect and to serve our community.”
Valdez says he wants the public to understand “the people that are out there protecting and serving our community. They are someone’s mother, their father, they have relatives here in town. They may not necessarily live here in Santa Fe, but hey, their roots are here.”
Nevertheless, with the evidence room comes controversy, and Valdez understands he is at the center of that storm.
“I knew that stepping into it, that that was going to be one of the big challenges,” he says, noting his predecessor, former Deputy Chief Robert Vasquez, “got the momentum going” to fix problems in the evidence room — securing funding for a full independent audit and working to secure accreditation for the evidence room.
To date, that audit is still pending, and the evidence room still has not been accredited.
Jennifer Burrill, the public defender whose work on the Valencia homicide case helped make public the problem, said Friday she was still “a little concerned about how slow the process is going, especially when public safety is concerned.”
Valdez responds police implemented changes, including training, almost immediately.
Others changes, he acknowledges, may take more time.
“Some things, they may take time to identify the best course of action,” Valdez says. “We want to make sure that we get it right. We don’t want to make any haphazard changes.”