By Scott Sandlin
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Things went horribly awry for an Albuquerque family with a son and brother suffering from severe mental illness in July 2005 - a little more than a month before another seriously mentally ill man, John Hyde, shot and killed five people.
Wyatt Vallejos, then 21, had started acting strangely months earlier. He carved the eyes out of pictures. He looked disheveled and depressed. He wasn’t sleeping. He was living in his car. He started threatening to kill family members because he believed they were poisoning him.
By the time of the climactic event that brought dozens of people to court last week, the family had sought help from police and behavioral health workers who determined that Wyatt had paranoid schizophrenia.
None of their efforts forestalled Wyatt’s brutal stabbing of his sister Destinie Vallejos, 32, which left her hospitalized for two weeks - her arm nearly severed, critical wounds in her chest, hand, thigh, spleen and lung - and with permanent scarring and nerve damage.
A state district court jury late Friday decided that Destinie’s injuries did not result from negligence by the Albuquerque Police Department, as she alleged. The trial was presided over by 2nd District Judge Nan Nash.
Wyatt, meanwhile, has never gone to trial on criminal charges stemming from the attack. He initially was found incompetent to stand trial and remains at the state mental hospital in Las Vegas, N.M.
Destinie Vallejos sued the city and two APD officers, among others, in 2007 claiming negligent failure to protect. Her lawsuit said police knew Wyatt was dangerous - he had three times escaped from the University of New Mexico behavioral health center, including once by breaking out a window and carjacking a van. The family had been so frightened by a series of events that on July 1, 2005, Destinie, her mother, father and stepmother decamped to a motel room after he burned his mother’s arm with a cigarette and threatened to kill her.
Destinie Vallejos alleged law enforcement hadn’t used tools available to it, such as issuing a hazard bulletin, making periodic watches of their homes, or keeping him in custody when he was known to be dangerous.
Vallejos’ attorney Louren Oliveros said her client had called 911 before anything happened and tried to get help, only to be told there had to be something more before they could act.
When 911 was called to Destinie’s home on the day of the stabbing, it took more than an hour for help to arrive, she said.
“This didn’t have to happen,” she told a jury. "(APD) had the means to prevent this and they didn’t.”
Stephanie Griffin and Sarah Lough, assistant city attorneys defending APD, said law enforcement “can only help people that help themselves.”
What happened to Destinie was “tragic,” Griffin said. There was not much dispute about facts, she said, but rather about the context in which events occurred. City personnel, both officers and counselors with the crisis intervention team, told the family not to have contact with Wyatt Vallejos, to refuse to answer the door if he came to their home, and to call 911 if he did.
Wyatt Vallejos’ violent outburst occurred after he showed up at his sister’s home. She let him in for a time and was trying unsuccessfully to get him to leave.
When Destinie yelled to a neighbor to call 911, it was given a low priority because as initially reported, “it was just a dispute,” Griffin said. By the time field officers arrived on scene, the call had been upgraded in priority because Wyatt had pulled out a knife.
“I’m not saying she’s a bad person,” Griffin told the jury. “But (Destinie) made some poor choices, such as deciding (Wyatt) would never hurt her. ... You have to decide if she exercised the duty of ordinary care for herself.”
Griffin said despite sympathy for Destinie’s considerable injuries, “In the end we did everything we could have done, including warning Destinie over and over again. The safety plan isn’t going to work unless you have willing participants,” she said.
Copyright 2010 Albuquerque Journal