Trinidad police arrested 40 people in a 2013 “drug sting” after two detectives botched their investigation and intentionally used wrong or misleading information from an unreliable confidential informant, according to a lawsuit the ACLU of Colorado filed Thursday.
None of the 40 people arrested were convicted of drug-related offenses, and the informant later was convicted of perjury.
Now, two of the people who were falsely arrested — and ultimately fired because of false allegations they were selling drugs — are suing and seeking damages from the city of Trinidad, less than 15 miles from the New Mexico state line, and the detectives who handled the case. The scathing, 41-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, names Detectives Phil Martin and Arsenio Vigil.
Danika Gonzales and Felicia Valdez claim their constitutional rights were violated by being arrested without probable cause. The lawsuit says Vigil and Martin fabricated details and used unchecked information from an unreliable confidential informant to obtain warrants for their arrests.
“A modicum of police work would have revealed that both of these plaintiffs were innocent of all the charges against them,” the complaint reads.
The charges against Gonzales and Valdez, who were arrested in December 2013, were dropped in June.
The lawsuit alleges that Vigil and Martin’s mishand ling of the case was a result of the department’s “conscious choice to have no policy regarding the use, supervision of, and reliance on confidential informants.”
Investigators’ mishandling of the case was first reported by Westword in November.
The same deficiencies found in the arrest warrants for Gonzales and Valdez were found in most of the 40 affidavits filed in the sting.
“It seems clear to me that at the Trinidad Police Department it is standard operating procedure to recruit snitches of unproven reliability and unleash them on the community with money and directives to buy drugs,” said Mark Silverstein, legal director of ACLU Colorado. “The result of that is it is an open invitation for a manipulative and opportunistic snitch to take advantage of that.”
Trinidad City Attorney Les Downs declined to comment Thursday. The officers’ disciplinary records were not available immediately from the city.
Feud not probed
Crystal Bachicha was one of two confidential informants the detectives received information from while investigating the sting. A woman who answered at a number listed for Bachicha declined to comment Thursday.
According to the complaint, Vigil and Martin knew Gonzales was a probation officer, but they did not reveal she was Bachicha’s former probation officer. They also did not disclose a long-standing feud between Bachicha and Valdez.
The possibility that Bachicha was using her position as a confidential informant to settle personal scores was not investigated or included on either warrant. Information challenging Bachicha’s credibility also was withheld from the affidavits, including an arrest for allegedly trying to obtain prescription drugs illegally while she was working as an informant.
Detectives also did not reveal that Bachicha agreed to work as an informant in exchange for the dismissal of pending felony charges by 3rd Judicial District Attorney Frank Ruybalid, according to the complaint.
Ruybalid, who says several accusations in the complaint are inaccurate, said he reviewed Bachicha’s case after police informed him she would be working as an informant. He said he dismissed the charges because they lacked merit. Bachicha ruined her credibility as an informant after she testified in court in one of the drug cases that she never worked for the Trinidad police, he said.
“It pretty much destroyed my ability to prosecute any of these cases,” Ruybalid said. “I have no confidence that she is ever going to tell the truth again.”
Bachicha was convicted of perjury in November.
Informant got $3,085
In March, Ruybalid is set to go on trial before a three-member disciplinary panel for allegations that he and his prosecutors mishandled a slew of criminal cases since 2010.
Bachicha netted $3,085 from Trinidad police for providing information. Detectives testified the amount of Bachicha’s payments was strictly based on the types of drugs she bought, but evidence shows she was paid the most for information about Gonzales and an administrative assistant who worked at City Hall, Silverstein said.
“Gonzales is a PROBATION OFFICER,” Vigil wrote in the affidavit.
The affidavit claimed that on two occasions Gonzales sold Bachicha drugs inside the courthouse where she worked. But Vigil and Martin did not witness any alleged drug buys and they did not pull security videos from the courthouse to confirm the exchange happened, according to the complaint.
“Instead of engaging in this type of basic police work, Defendants Vigil and Martin chose to take CI Bachicha at her word,” the complaint says.
Investigators also did not witness any of the buys Valdez was accused of making. Valdez lost her job with the Trinidad school district, and she and her children were evicted from their subsidized housing because of the arrest.
Five months after Gonzales was arrested, lab tests from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation revealed that what Bachicha said was heroin she purchased from Gonzales was actually a mixture of codeine and a marijuana component. Vigil wrote in the affidavit that a field test was positive for methamphetamine.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794, jsteffen@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jsteffendp
