Coming into open session after a closed session Sept. 24, the Truth or Consequences City Commission agreed to a settlement agreement of $150,000 to be paid to the Shaquille Ferguson Jr. Estate, with the proviso that only the deceased child’s siblings benefit from the payout, according to City Manager Gary Whitehead.
Shaquille Ferguson Jr. was found dead, June 12, 2021, downstream from the city’s Ralph Edwards Park, whose father was charged with abuse of a child resulting in death, among other charges.
See the linked Citizen article for more details:
The city, city commission and the city police department were sued for damages about two years ago by Rachel Higgins, an attorney appointed by a Santa Fe court to act as the “personal representative” of the Shaquille Ferguson Jr. Estate.
The basis of the suit centered around eight calls reporting Ferguson Jr.’s abuse at the hands of his father, which went uninvestigated by the city’s police department, according to Higgins’ court filing.
The state’s Tort Claims Act limits damages to $750,000 for a governmental entity for cases in which “one person” and “one instance” is being litigated.
Whitehead said the $150,000 will be paid by the city’s self-insurers fund, administered by the New Mexico Municipal League, whose legal team represented the city and negotiated the settlement.
How on Earth does this kind of stuff happen? Uninvestigated? I don’t know the details, but it’s not like these guys are overworked (maybe underpaid though) at least from my admittedly limited observations. Could there be a leadership problem?
There was a leadership problem in 2021, when this happened. They were between chiefs of police and had experienced a lot of turnover in that position, which seems stable now.
I spoke with Chief of Police Luis Tavizon recently about child abuse in this town. I recently realized what SCI reports are. Tavizon and sometimes officers subbing for him give regular oral reports and I never knew what the heck a “sky reports” were, which is how they pronounce that acronym. If I had seen a written report I might have googled the acronym and caught on sooner. One day I asked and got a very vague and, I felt, evasive answer, which made me dig. Finally I figured out it is State Central Intake, which doesn’t help much. This is code for calls reporting child abuse. The state relays the calls to T or C police, if the call or report to SCI is from the city’s geographic area. There were an astounding 8 such calls in just 10 days in May.
I asked Tavizon where T or C is on the scale of child abuse. He said it is bad here, in his experience, which includes other parts of the state. He worked in Deming and he said child abuse is bad there too, saying it has about the same number of reports. But we have half the population of Deming proper, so T or C is really bad.
I complained about the SCI/SKY acronym and vague allusion to child abuse and asked them to be more transparent to raise awareness of our problem. Tavizon is now adding descriptors, such as CYFD, which is still too vague. I hope he gets more specific.