With the ink barely dry on a U.S. Department of Justice report slamming Albuquerque police for their frequent use of excessive and lethal force, the New Mexico city is now reeling from its third officer-involved shooting in little more than a month — one that killed the 19-year-old foster daughter of a retired judge.
Mary Hawkes’ death has added fuel to the fire of criticism over the tactics of the Albuquerque Police Department, which, according to the Justice Department, has an entrenched culture of deadly force. Since 2010, officers have shot 37 people, 23 of them fatally.
“It’s not every day that a police department kills a 19-year-old that looks like she weighs 100 pounds,” Shannon Kennedy, an attorney who has challenged the department’s use of force, told the Los Angeles Times.
Some officers, she added, “are simply not to fit to make split-second decisions about life and death.”
Hawkes, the daughter of former Valencia County Magistrate Court Judge Danny Hawkes, was shot and killed by APD Officer Jeremy Dear early Monday. The officer opened fire after the younger Hawkes, who was suspected of stealing a car, pointed a gun at him, authorities said.
Police initially spotted Hawkes around 3 a.m. as she was driving the vehicle but lost her in traffic. When the abandoned vehicle was located later, items left inside led police to identify Hawkes and an address for her at a nearby trailer park.
Shortly before 6 a.m., Hawkes led officers, who had set up a perimeter around the trailer park, on a foot chase. “The suspect stopped, turned and pointed a handgun at close range,” Police Chief Gordon Eden Jr. told reporters.
Bullet holes in a nearby wall indicate that Dear, a six-and-a-half-year veteran of the department, fired multiple shots at Hawkes.
Albuquerque officers are equipped with lapel cameras, but Eden said the department had not been able to retrieve video from the one Dear was wearing.
“We know the technology is not 100 percent foolproof,” he said.
Hawkes died just over a month after the March 16 shooting of James Boyd, a homeless and mentally ill man who was camping illegally in the Sandia Mountains. He had been acting erratically, according to police, but helmet camera footage from the shooting showed Boyd turning away from officers before he was shot.
On March 25 — the same day hundreds of marchers protested the Boyd killing — police shot and killed another man, Alfred Redwine, outside an apartment building.
The Justice Department investigation, launched in November 2012, called for “systemic change” in the department, finding that “APD officers too frequently use deadly force against people who pose a minimal threat and in situations where the conduct of the officers heightens the danger and contributes to the need to use force.”
According to court documents, Hawkes had a criminal record that included charges of shoplifting and drinking in public.
“Despite all the issues she encountered in her short life, we as a family loved her and supported her and will deeply miss her,” her family said in a statement released Friday.