By Matt Andazola
Albuquerque Journal
One of the last people to see 18-year-old Amanda Wiley before she was shot dead and left in a ditch Friday morning was an Albuquerque police officer, a family member said.
Wiley’s aunt, Melanie Wiley, said she found out last week there was a warrant for her niece’s arrest and urged her to turn herself in. Amanda did so Thursday night, but officers couldn’t find the warrant so there was no arrest.
“She was trying to do the right thing,” Melanie Wiley said. “I think she was reaching out for help.”
The warrant was issued because Amanda Wiley had gone missing from an Albuquerque group home where she had been living for five months, violating the terms of her juvenile probation. Her juvenile records are sealed, so it’s unclear what she had been charged with. Her probation was set to end in five months.
Her juvenile probation officer sought the arrest warrant, which was issued at 10 a.m. Thursday, a state Children Youth and Families Department spokesman said.
But CYFD isn’t able to enter warrants into law enforcement databases on its own, and Thursday’s warrants weren’t picked up by the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office until the next day.
That meant that when Wiley tried to turn herself in Thursday night, police searching for the warrant could not have found it in the system. Hours after Wiley talked to police, someone shot her in the back of the head and left her nude body in an irrigation ditch in the North Valley, said Sgt. Mark Kmatz with the Sheriff’s Office.
Her warrant was entered Friday morning.
“I go over in my head, over and over again, ‘what if, what if, what if,’ ” Melanie Wiley said. “But I’m trying not to. You can have all the regret in the world, but you can’t change things.”
Albuquerque police spokesman T.J. Wilham said the department would release more information after it had looked into the sequence of events.
While Wiley had left the group home, she had continued to attend school on a regular basis.
She was a student at Los Puentes Charter School in Nor thwest A lbuquerque, where she attended every day last week, including Thursday, said principal Ellen Moore.
“She was a very kind and loving young woman,” said Moore, who said she’d known Wiley since she started at the school for at-risk students about five years ago. “She maintained good grades, she was a good girl.”
Wiley wanted to be a lawyer, her aunt said. “We had talked about going to get a GED. She said, ‘No, auntie, I want to get my diploma. I want to go to college.’ ”
Wiley was always bright, her aunt said, and was very excited about going to prom in the coming weeks.
Other students at Los Puentes are taking the news hard, but the school has a very strong team of counselors and therapists trained to help the other students cope, Moore said.
Before her death, Wiley was going through a particularly rough patch, as shown by the despairing posts she left on Facebook, one of which said she would shoot herself because she thought she would be better off, and “so would every 1 else.”
Wiley’s family declined to go into details but said she was having some troubles.
A Bernalillo County juvenile booking document shows she was arrested last August at her mother’s home on domestic violence charges. But the complaint with any details was sealed along with the rest of her juvenile record.
Her family said that while Wiley sounded emotional online, they don’t believe she would ever act on those impulses.
“I can honestly say I don’t think she would have hurt herself,” Melanie Wiley said.
And despite her life’s ups and downs, Wiley wasn’t as dour in person as her online activity might make it seem. “Amanda always had a smile on her face no matter what she was going through,” Melanie Wiley said. “Any time I spent with her, she always made me giggle.”
“She was loved,” said her mother, Loriann Zamora, in a phone interview. “We want the killer to be found. If it takes all my breath, everything from me, I’m going to find that person that killed my daughter.”
No one had been arrested Tuesday, Kmatz said, and there were no suspects in the shooting.
Copyright 2012 Albuquerque Journal