City stores stock up for Y2K jitters

Lawyers say cocaine claims are ridiculous

'Policing 101' is eye opener for Crownpoint folk

Jury indicts Milan man for sex act

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City stores stock up for Y2K jitters

Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — California Supermarkets has been stocking up on everything from water to toilet paper in anticipation of a big rush on some goods by people who still have the Y2K jitters.

"We have already noticed people coming in for some of these items," said Joe DiGregorio, owner of the two California Supermarkets in town.

The supermarket has ordered a extra truckload of bottled water, figuring a lot of people will be storing several gallons in case the Y2K bug disrupts water service on Jan. 1.

Extra stocks of lighting items, including candles, flashlight batteries and propane for Coleman lanterns have also been purchased, DiGregorio said.

"We are also stocking up on batteries of all varieties just in case," he said, preparing for the possibility that television stations will go blank and children will need an extra supply of batteries for their game sets.

While no one has suggested there may be a toilet paper shortage, DiGregorio said he is not taking a chance and has put in extra supplies in case there is an extra big demand for this item in the next two weeks.

"We're also stocking up on extra first-aid kits," he said.

The federal government is suggesting that families to be on the safe side stock up on enough food to last several days, so DiGregorio said his stores have ordered higher than usual amounts of everything from fruits and vegetables to canned goods.
"Of course, there are those who think that nothing will happen, so for those individuals, we have ordered a lot of extra bottles of champagne," he said.

The extra ordering of champagne is an annual event about this time of the year. But because of the end of the century and millennium, DiGregorio said, his stores are stocking more champagne than usual, from the cheaper bottles to the ones that cost $100 or more.

"As you can see, we're prepared for any eventuality," he said.

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Lawyers say cocaine claims are ridiculous

Andrea Egger Rider
Special to the Independent

GALLUP — For years, Joe Shattuck has saved the unloved, the confessed murderers, of Gallup and every other town in New Mexico, from facing the death penalty.

Now, local and statewide attorneys are defending Shattuck.

Gail Evans, a public defender, has accused Shattuck, the head of the Capital Crimes Division of the New Mexico Public Defender's Office in Albuquerque, of asking her to get him cocaine while they defended a case in Clovis.

Evans says in an affidavit filed in Portales on Dec. 9 that Shattuck's drug use and poor lawyering put their client, Michael Treadway, 19, on death row.

Gallup attorney Robert Aragon, along with other state attorneys, said they find the claims ludicrous. Shattuck's work is top-notch, Aragon said.

Treadway was convicted and sentenced to death Nov. 5 in the 1997 shooting death of Everett Clint "Red" Prather of Texico. Evans and Albuquerque attorney Jeffrey Buckels are asking for a new trial.

While death penalty cases in Gallup are rare, Shattuck has defended at least three cases here, each in which his client received a life sentence instead of death. Statewide, Shattuck has kept numerous clients off death row.

"That says volumes," Aragon said. "Repeatedly, he does his job very well."

Aragon finds the allegations of cocaine use unthinkable. "His performances in court are utterly incompatible with that."
Los Lunas District Attorney Robert Schwartz, a former Albuquerque district attorney went a step further. "He is being sacrificed as a way to get this guy (Treadway) off," Schwartz said. "Joe's probably the most talented attorney in that unit."
Schwartz recently presented to McKinley County grand jurors the shooting death case of Paul Fitzjerrell, 25, a local man who was killed while drinking alcohol with former Gallup Police Officer Michael Brandau.

When Schwartz was district attorney in Albuquerque, he and Shattuck were on opposing sides of many death penalty cases. "Joe has saved many a person's neck," Schwartz said.

Schwartz said if Evans believed Shattuck used drugs during the trial, she had a legal and moral obligation to tell the judge immediately, not to wait for the trial's outcome.

"If she knew that, she should be the one in front of the disciplinary board," Schwartz said.

Randall Harris, the district attorney in Portales who prosecuted Treadway, said he "is concerned about the truthfulness and voracity of Miss Evans."

He quoted Evans as saying during the trial: "Mr. Harris, there is nothing I won't do to save that boy's life."

Harris finds her affidavit "suspicious" coming after this statement and Treadway's sentence.

He said he fears Evans' affidavit is a "ploy" to keep Treadway from death row.

"Mr. Shattuck zealously represented his client," Harris said. "I hope it's not the intent of Miss Evans to undermine this jury."
Evans wrote in her affidavit that at different times during the trial, Shattuck asked her if she had cocaine, if she'd like some cocaine and if she would get him some cocaine. He later told her he was joking, she wrote.

"He did not use cocaine at that time in my presence," she wrote in the affidavit.

Evans wrote that Treadway's mother expressed concern that Shattuck might be using cocaine because he told her cocaine nearly destroyed his life in past years.

Evans described Shattuck's courtroom behavior as swinging from "strutting around like a peacock" to being "flat, withdrawn and emotional."

She believes he suffered from cocaine withdrawal. Evans didn't return phone calls to her office Thursday.
The affidavits accuse Shattuck of failing to review crucial audio tapes and of not interviewing witnesses until the day of the trial. The document also accuses Shattuck of taking no action on a plea agreement that included a sentence of life in prison.
Harris said there was no such official offer. Instead, Harris deferred to the Prather's family's desire for him to seek the death penalty.

But Buckels said he has a copy of a letter from Harris to Shattuck, withdrawing a plea.

"Whatever his (Harris') motives were, he made it," Buckels said of a plea offer. "The defense never did anything. As a result, my client is sitting there on death row."

Buckels said Thursday that Shattuck will have his own day in court, probably in February.

State Public Defender Phyllis Subin could not be reached for comment on administrative action. Buckels didn't say whether he or Evans will seek disbarment from the Supreme Court's disciplinary board.

Shattuck declined to comment.

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''Policing 101' is eye opener for Crownpoint folk

Bill Donovan
Diné Bureau

CROWNPOINT — It's Wednesday night and the 20 people some from as far away as Fort Defiance and Canoncito watch as the Navajo tribal police officer responds to the domestic violence call.

They see the disturbance through the eyes of the police officer as he tries to calm down the man and woman while at the same time making sure the violence doesn't erupt into something serious that will not only put the spouse at risk but the officer as well.

But before the situation becomes really serious, it's over. And the audience who better understands now the pressure the tribal police officer experiences in handling such calls bursts out in applause.

Welcome to Community Policing 101, as practiced for the past three years by Crownpoint Capt. Samson Cowboy, who gives community residents a chance to learn first-hand how the police department operates. A number of Navajo police officers also volunteer their time to the program.

After four weeks of lectures on everything from fingerprinting to writing out a police report, students in the class this week had a chance to participate in various scenarios including a traffic stop, an accident stop and a domestic disturbance to see why police officers do what they do.

"This is a lot better than just going to the chapter and giving a lecture on police work," Cowboy said.

He began the program three years ago to allow residents of the Crownpoint area a chance to learn more about the police, how they operate and some of the pressures they face on a daily basis in trying to do their job properly.

The class, which is held for three hours a week for six weeks, has been praised by those who have gone through it as "an eye-opener."

When the program started, most of those who took the course said they came with a naive impression about the work the tribal police did. This impression was based on what they saw on television and negative comments they had heard from their friends and neighbors.

"We hope that by the time the six weeks are over, people will have a better understanding of what we go through," said Cowboy.

For example, when police come to the scene of a burglary, the people who have experienced it complain the officers don't bother dusting for fingerprints.

So Cowboy, along with the police officers who volunteer their time to teach the course, shows how useless fingerprinting a
burglary scene is. "It's not only messy, but it can ruin the family's furniture," Cowboy said.

Since hundreds of prints probably would be lifted some of them from the family and others from people who have recently visited the chances of the police being able to determine which are the burglar's prints is remote. And that assumes the police have the time to spend trying to compare the lifted fingerprints with those of the criminals in the department's files.

Another session dealt with the growing use of the digital camera at crime scenes and how it allows photos of the scene to be downloaded into computers.

Next week, those who have completed the course will be given certificates and the thanks of the police department for taking the time to learn more about police work.

"We had some young people ages 17 and 18 taking the course this year," Cowboy said. "If they're that interested, maybe they will later decide to become police officers."

Cowboy said the program's success needs to be shared with the police officers who have given their free time to participate in the program and with the Department of Youth and Family Services, which allowed the police to use its building for the class.
Some of the credit is also given to the tribe's police chief, Leonard Butler, who has urged district police stations to do more within the community to forge a partnership to combat crime on the reservation.

"With limits on our funding, we need to get as much help from reservation communities as possible if we want to see crime go down," Butler said in 1998 when he spoke about community policing.

So far, however, Crownpoint is the only district on the reservation to hold such a program.

"But there has been some interest from other police districts about our program," Cowboy said.

He added that he and others in the Crownpoint Police District are planning to hold a one-day training session for other police districts in the near future to show them how to set up similar courses.

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Jury indicts Milan man for sex act

Tom Purdom
Staff Writer

GRANTS — A 36-year-old Milan man faces charges after allegedly having sex with a child on Sept. 3.

Elkin Desiderio was indicted by the 13th Judicial District grand jury with criminal sexual penetration in the fourth degree because of an alleged sex act with a girl who was at least 13 years old but less than 16 years old, the indictment states.

Desiderio is also charged with enticement of a child because he allegedly enticed, persuaded or attempted to persuade the victim to enter a vehicle, a building, room or secluded place so he could have sex with her. The enticement charge is a misdemeanor and the sex act is a fourth-degree felony...

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Task force: Poor readers doomed to welfare, jail

Walter Howerton Jr.
Santa Fe Bureau

SANTA FE — Reading. Reading. Reading. Or to put it another way: READING!

That's the first issue a special task force believes the state should attend to if it wants to start putting some education into its failing educational system.

Education task force co-chairman David Townsend, a retired Alamogordo educator, said in an interview Thursday that teaching New Mexico's children to read by the time they are in the third grade is the first suggestion the task force will make to the Legislature when it meets in January...

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Attorney's duty is keeping clients alive

Andrea Egger Rider
Special to the Independent

GALLUP — Pleading guilty to killing his girlfriend, driving around for an hour and then taking her dead body to the Gallup jail kept a Gallup man from facing "legal" death.

Ben Johnson is now serving a life sentence in prison after the 1998 shooting of his girlfriend outside a gas station in eastern Gallup in 1998.

Jailers said they couldn't believe it when they found a bloody body in the pickup truck that Johnson left outside the jail that morning...

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Men plead guilty

Nancy Watson
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Two area men have pleaded guilty in U.S. district court one for running over his former wife's legs with a pickup truck and the other for aggravated sexual abuse of a child. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Wendell Murphy, 27 of Church Rock, pleaded guilty to assault resulting in serious bodily injury.

In May 1997, Murphy was arrested for running over his former wife's legs with a pickup truck. His ex-wife suffered compound fractures in her legs and is permanently injured...

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Conference reunites women seeking peace in war-torn areas

David Abel
The Boston Globe

BOSTON — Mary Montague helped stanch the wounds of her fellow Catholics gunned down in the streets of Belfast.

Sumaya Naser walked in front of Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at rock-throwing Palestinians to protect children caught in the cross fire.

Rosa Emilia Salamanca helped stage anti-violence protests in Colombia, despite the near anarchy there that often leaves the outspoken in unmarked graves...

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