By Uriel J. Garcia and Phaedra Haywood
The Santa Fe New Mexican
LAS CRUCES, N.M. — They were chosen at random, two young sheriff’s deputies assigned to transport a petty criminal 430 miles from Santa Fe to Safford, Ariz. Jeremy Martin and Tai Chan left early that Monday morning in an unmarked Ford Explorer. Martin would return home in a casket escorted by fellow officers from across the state. Chan remains locked in a jail in Las Cruces, accused of shooting his fellow deputy several times in the back and arms during a heated argument at a hotel.
Before the violent clash that ended one of their lives and permanently altered the other’s, the two deputies shared some things in common. They were both relatively new to law enforcement but were on their way to promising careers. They both treasured time with their families. Martin was a married father of three with a fourth child on the way. Chan was preparing for his first child.
And now their names will be etched side by side in one of the darker chapters of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
What led to the deadly argument, or what it was even about, remains unknown. But the stories of Martin and Chan’s lives up to that moment reveal the depth of what was lost when, according to police, Chan began pulling the trigger.
Early Pain
Jeremy Martin was born in Massachusetts, but his father moved the family including Jeremy’s two older brothers and older sister — to Arizona when Jeremy Martin was still a child.
Martin’s father, James Martin, was a Christian missionary who worked on the Apache reservation in White River, Ariz., and with the Pima Indians near Coolidge, Ariz.
“Most of [Jeremy’s] growing up was near Indian reservations,” said Jeremy’s uncle, Paul Martin, of Tulsa, Okla.
When Jeremy was 14, his father died of an aneurysm. He was just 50, Paul Martin said. The sudden death forced Jeremy, the youngest of the children, to become “a man,” his uncle said.
“I remember he played the saxophone at his father’s funeral,” Paul Martin said.
He said his nephew dropped out of high school and at age 17 married wife Sarah and began a family. He worked construction jobs — sometimes with his father-in-law — to support his family, his uncle said. Like his father before him, Jeremy and his young family were deeply religious.
“He had a rough start,” Paul Martin said of his nephew. “He had to work hard. He got married very young. But he never wavered. He married that gal, and they have done very well.”
But Martin was already thinking about a new career.
A Local Boy
Tai Chan, 27, was born and raised in Santa Fe. He was a good student who avoided trouble, said his mother, JoAnn Chan.
But when he did get in trouble with his teachers, Chan knew that he would also get disciplined at home, so he would always fess up to his mistakes, his mother said.
“We taught him that he knew that he had to be held accountable for everything he did,” JoAnn Chan said.
After Capshaw Middle School, Tai Chan attended Santa Fe High School and graduated in 2005. There he developed a musical interest and at age 13 taught himself how to play the guitar. His brother, Tru Chan, said one day his older brother told him he wanted to play guitar, so he started teaching himself country songs with music-instruction DVDs.
“Whenever he set his mind to something, he would do it,” Tru Chan said.
During his teenage years, the aspiring deputy Rollerbladed at the De Vargas Park skateboard park, the brother said. Tru Chan described his relationship with his brother as “closer than most siblings.” He said he would always go to Tai Chan for advice. “With every situation, he would think about it and give me the best answer.”
After his high school graduation, Tai Chan left Northern New Mexico and attended New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Tru Chan said his brother was an athletic person who loved sports, playing soccer, volleyball and dodgeball. As he did in high school, Tai Chan only aimed for good grades, A’s and B’s. He was disciplined, his brother said.
“I’ve always said Tai was the most strongest out of all of us in the family,” Tru Chan said. “Emotionally, mentally and physically.”
Tai Chan graduated in 2010 with a criminal justice degree and the next year joined the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. He told his brother he hoped to one day join a federal law enforcement agency and work his way up. The brother said Tai Chan never said what agency, but that he planned to focus on being a good sheriff’s deputy.
A New Start
Santa Fe County Cpl. James Yeager met Jeremy Martin before he moved to Santa Fe or became a law enforcement officer, via a shared passion — Jeeps.
“I’m the one that talked him into coming to Santa Fe and joining the sheriff’s office,” Yeager said.
Yeager was searching Craigslist for some parts for his Jeep. Martin was selling tires that Yeager was interested in, and the corporal, who also had moved to Santa Fe from Arizona, said he called Martin, and “we just struck up a conversation.”
Yeager said Martin asked where in Arizona he was from, and when he answered Scottsdale, Martin cracked, “Oh Scottsdale, huh?
That’s for all the snobby people.” Martin told Yeager he lived in Phoenix with the working folk.
“I got to know his sense of humor right then,” Yeager said.
Yeager told Martin he was a police officer, and Martin said he had a strong interest in law enforcement but that it was hard to get on a force in Arizona. Yeager told Martin that the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office had testing coming up. Martin showed up “kind of rough with a big beard,” Yeager recalled, but he excelled on the preliminary tests.
Martin trained to be a law enforcement officer at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, and his first and only job in law enforcement was at the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
“We had been friends since the day he started here,” Yeager said with emotion in his voice.
Martin was mechanically inclined, Yeager said, and the pair spent hours working on their Jeeps together. They worked at the Martin house, a mobile home off N.M. 14 accessorized by a boat, a motorcycle, a fire pit surrounded by tiki torches, lounge chairs and a child’s play set.
The Martins had three young children, and Sarah Martin is pregnant with a fourth.
Sarah Martin declined to be interviewed for this story. But posts from her Facebook page offer a glimpse of the way she approached life and her marriage.
“Did you ever think about the blessings of being at home?” she wrote in late August.
“I was thinking about this last week — about how hard my husband works so I can do all the things that are so easy to take for granted on a daily basis. When our husbands are at work they are making the selfless sacrifice of being away from our children so that we can stay home and nurture and watch over them.”
She added a quote she had read: “We need women who set their hearts on making their homes pleasant, sunny, and fragrant for the husband. He who works from dawn till dusk for the home and wife and babes, look forward to the warm welcome that awaits him when the long day is over; of the bright smile and the love words that will be sure to greet him when he crosses the threshold of his own little Eden; of the cheerful fire in winter and the humble meals made so delicious by the love that prepares it and the sweet words that season it.”
Jeremy Martin’s page was dominated by pictures of his family and law enforcement-themed memes, including several devoted to officers killed in the line of duty.
“More than anything, he was a family man,” said Martin’s uncle, Paul Martin. “He would have done anything in the world for his family.
They were first place in his heart. His job was second. And I know he was a good Christian man because of the way he was raised.”
Jeremy Martin’s mother, Linda Martin, also lives in Santa Fe and is a teacher at Capital High School.
“He was a very devoted husband and father,” Yeager said of the deputy, who was 29 when he died. “His kids would come out, and we’d be working on the Jeeps and he’d ask his son, ‘Hey, hand me a screwdriver,’ ‘Hand me this,’ and make ‘em feel like they were helping us out.”
Yeager said the young deputy also enjoyed the outdoors, was fond of camping and fishing, and always involved his family in his visits to the wilderness.
Martin’s uncle said it wasn’t unusual for his nephew to have a few beers, but he said the young man wasn’t known “to drink to stupor,” or for having a bad temper. “I would like to know what the argument was about,” Paul Martin said. “Because my nephew would not have started something.”
A Mutual Love Of Family
Like Martin, Chan loved to hunt and fish with his family. He also liked to snowboard and ski with his younger brother, Tru Chan. The brother said they recently got into golf.
Their mom, JoAnn, said every vacation Tai Chan took turned into a family vacation. They would sometimes visit Durango, Colo., to get away from Santa Fe.
Family members said Chan wasn’t a heavy drinker and never lost control of his temper. During family dinners, Chan would discuss his job with his parents, who say he took the profession seriously and wanted to do nothing to jeopardize it.
“He never let the authority get to his head,” JoAnn Chan said. “He never said he ever abused his power while he was on the job.”
While he was still in college, Tai Chan met a woman who would become his wife, Susana Gonzales. The couple dated for seven years before they married. But the honeymoon was short-lived. The couple divorced in June 2013, three months after they got married, the Chan family said.
Susana eventually married Tai Chan’s best friend, Josh Sexauer. Tru Chan said his brother “fell out of love” with Gonzales and he was happy “that two people he loved found each other.”
In 2012, before he married Gonzales, Tai Chan met Leah Tafoya. Like Chan, Tafoya was involved in law enforcement as a probation and parole officer with Santa Fe County. They met through a mutual friend, Tafoya said.
The couple met again in 2013 at the Department of Corrections gym and became friends. The next year, the friendship blossomed into a relationship, Tafoya said during an emotional phone interview. They moved in together. Tafoya would place little notes in his lunch box before he left to work in the morning.
“At least one of those notes every week says, ‘Thank you for making me bright and shiny,’ ” Tafoya said, crying. “Because when I first met him, I was in such a dark place, and he brought me back to life.”
Tafoya, who is now 10 weeks’ pregnant, said the couple planned to get married after the baby was born. They were hoping for a boy.
“For right now, we’re calling him ‘baby Chan.’ ”
The Saturday before the deputies left for Arizona, Tai Chan and Tafoya had a barbecue at their house. A few close friends and some of Chan’s cousins were invited to the get-together. To Tafoya’s surprise, it was at that event that Chan excitedly told the attendees that he and his girlfriend were going to have a child.
“I wasn’t ready to come out,” Tafoya said during the in-person interview. “I didn’t realize that this was going to be my coming out party. He was so excited.”
Committed Deputies
Sheriff Robert Garcia described Chan and Martin as hardworking, committed deputies. They had unblemished records with the force and Chan, the nephew of County Commissioner Robert Anaya, had recently received a letter of commendation for his work on a burglary case.
Yeager knew both deputies but was closest to Martin, whom he also supervised.
“If you asked him to do something, he did it. He didn’t fuss about it, he didn’t question it,” Yeager recalled. “He’d say ‘Sure, you got it, sir. I’ll do whatever you need.’ He was very respectful and knew his job very well for as young as he was and his position.”
Yeager said Martin rose from cadet to Deputy I and then Deputy II in his three years with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. He had recently joined the traffic homicide team and became a field training officer who helped new deputies get acquainted with the force and the city.
“He had a great future here at the sheriff’s office,” Yeager said of Martin. “Everyone he came into contact with liked him. He had a real good way of talking to people, even in a bad situation.”
Yeager said he was also friendly with Tai Chan and that Martin knew him, too.
“We are a small department,” Yeager said. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody is friendly. They were friendly in work and never had an issue.”
Tafoya said Martin was excited about going on the trip with Chan. The two deputies had texted each other a few times over the weekend while finalizing details. “They weren’t best friends, but they were friends,” Tafoya said of the deputies’ relationship. “There was no bad blood there.”
The trip went smoothly enough that on the way back, they decided to stop for the night in Las Cruces, where Chan had gone to college.
They checked into room 7111 in the Hotel Encanto, one of the city’s nicer hotels, and Chan called up his old friend, Sexauer, to join them for drinks.
Sexauer met them at the hotel. By then, Chan and Martin had already been drinking, Sexauer later told police. Chan told Sexauer he didn’t want to drive because he had a duty vehicle, so Sexauer drove them to Dublin’s Pub near the college campus.
There, Sexauer later told police, Chan and Martin continued to drink and got into a heated argument. They started pointing fingers at each other and at one point had to be separated by a bartender.
Sexauer told police he had never seen Chan become “hostile like that,” according to the criminal complaint.
Sexauer left the pub. Chan told him that he and Martin would take a cab back to the hotel.
According to police, the argument continued back at their seventh-floor hotel room. At 12:31 a.m., Sexauer said he got a call from Tafoya, who told him she had just been on the phone with Chan and was worried. She told him she heard someone yell “Please don’t, please don’t!” followed by the sound of gunshots.
Police say Chan fired several shots from his Glock semiautomatic handgun, striking Martin in the back and arms as he fled for the elevator. Police found Martin staggering and bleeding profusely on the second-floor lobby. They found Chan slumped in a stairwell outside the locked door to the hotel roof, smelling heavily of alcohol, according to the criminal complaint.
Sexauer did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story, and police reports do not say what the deputies were arguing about.
Tafoya, on advice of Chan’s lawyer, John Day, declined to discuss what she and Chan had spoken about while they were on the phone or any other aspect of the argument and shooting. Chan’s family also declined to talk about it.
Chan has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer says police released inaccurate information in the criminal complaint, but he has declined to elaborate.
The last time Yeager saw Chan and Martin was Monday morning. They were together in the parking lot, getting ready to leave for Arizona.
“They were happy,” he said. “Kind of lighthearted to be going on an expedition that was business.”
Copyright 2014 The Santa Fe New Mexican