Incidents sucker-punch city
Gallup left with black eye following coverage of dragging, dog-shooting

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — For the second time in less than a month, Gallup is national news and once again, it's not a positive story.

First it was the story of a dog with an arrow through his head and now the national media is wondering if Fausto Arellano, 32, was dragged for almost a mile on a Gallup street because it was a hate crime.

Arellano suffered road rash burns over 50 percent of his body and is now in critical condition in the trauma and burn unit at the University of Hospital in Albuquerque.

As of Tuesday afternoon, he had not recovered enough to talk to police or family members so no one knows right now the motive behind this crime.

But that has not stopped speculation in the national media about whether the Gallup incident is just another case of a hate crime.

Gallup Police Chief Sylvester Stanley was asked about that possibility of national television Tuesday morning when he was interviewed by Matt Lauer on "The Today Show."

"I suspect that this was the only reason why the case has made national attention," said Stanley.

The national interest - Stanley was also interviewed live on "Good Morning America" Wednesday morning and spent most of his day on Tuesday giving interviews to reporters ranging from the Albuquerque Journal to CNN all seemed to center around whether the motive has something to do with race or lifestyle.

The interest, said Stanley, stems from all of the national furor over a case a few years ago in Texas when two men were convicted of dragging another man to his death behind their pickup in a raciallymotivated crime.

"This is Gallup. This is not Texas," said Bill Nechero, a lifelong resident of Gallup and a member of the Gallup City Council.

He and others in the city government said Tuesday that the latest negative story out of Gallup has nothing to do with the facts but deals solely on speculation.

"How can you determine if race is the motive behind this crime when you have no idea who the perpetrators are?" he asked.

Stanley, who has been here in Gallup for 18 months now, said he has seen nothing in this town that would indicate to him that there is a race problem.

In fact, when the crime was first reported to him, the last thing on his mind was the possibility that this would be hate crime.

"The first thing that came to mind was that this may have been due to domestic violence, followed by gang relations or narcotics," he said, adding that two days after the incident he still sees no reason to suspect that race had anything to do with the crime.

But the nature of the crime dragging a person behind a pickup does indicate that the person or persons involved has an immense amount of anger against the individual and Stanley said you don't see this a lot.

In fact, in his 30 years in law enforcement, with 20 of them in Bernalillo County, this is the first dragging case of this nature he has come across.

He now has six officers within his department actively investigating the crime and none of them are dwelling on the possibility that race may be the reason behind the crime.

Instead, they are doing what detectives do they're looking at something in the person's life as being the reason for the crime.

"Right now, we are doing a compete victimology," said Stanley, trying to find out if someone in Arellano's life had reason enough to want to drag him to his death.

Because that is what police suspect the perpetrators wanted to do and it was only because the rope broke after less than a mile of dragging that saved the victim's life, Stanley said.

But Gallup may also be a victim in this crime as well as the national media speculates about whether something in this town may have been the catalyst behind the crime.

Gallup Mayor Bob Rosebrough doesn't think that the latest negative stories that have brought Gallup into the limelight would do any lasting damage to the town's reputation.

"I don't think that this will affect Gallup's image," he said, adding that he would really be surprised if race had anything to do with the crime.

"This was an horrendous crime," he said. "Cruelty of this magnitude is just hard to imagine."