Rebecca Jaramillo stepped out of the Santa Fe jail and into the cold one night in January 2021. After two days in a cell, she was free, but no one was there to pick her up. So, with a snowstorm coming, she began the long walk toward town.
The jail in Santa Fe, surrounded by barbed wire and tumbleweed, sits on a remote stretch of highway far from the city’s bustling plaza and historic churches. It is nearly two miles down the highway to the closest gas station, three miles to where a sidewalk starts and eight miles to the nearest homeless shelter.
Ms. Jaramillo, 33, made it only about a mile from the jail that night before she was hit by a sheriff’s deputy driving a police pickup truck at 57 miles per hour. Her body was thrown more than 100 feet, and she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Ms. Jaramillo is one of several people who have died trying to make it home from the Santa Fe jail on foot in recent years. It is a walk that has been far more deadly than previously reported.
Known officially as the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility, the jail was moved to its more remote location in 1998, and before long, local leaders took note of how dangerous the walk was, even as they did little to solve the problem. As far back as 2002, county commissioners expressed concern someone could be struck.
Spurred by the 2015 death of Alan Cruthirds, who had been released and fatally run over, the local paper wrote an editorial saying that officials “must do more to make sure inmates aren’t at risk.”
But the problem has persisted. Five people have been fatally struck shortly after being released over the past decade, four of them since March 2020, according to records obtained by The New York Times. Several more people have been injured.
Across the country, local jails have faced criticism for releasing people late at night, into dangerous neighborhoods or without transportation options. The federal prison system is required to ensure access to transportation for released prisoners, and many state prison systems do so as well. But local jails in many cases leave it to the people who are released to get home themselves.
Citing the risks of releasing people at night, California lawmakers passed a bill in 2019 that would have required jails to give inmates the option of waiting until morning to be released, but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying it was too costly.
In Santa Fe, county commissioners have occasionally tried to improve the situation but failed to solve the problem. Most nights on a recent week, a steady stream of people walked out of the jail and onto the side of the highway, trudging along a narrow shoulder as commuters and big rigs flew by.
Paul Duran, a former county commissioner, said the situation could be improved if there were more coordination among judges, who issue the orders releasing people from jail; jail officials, who process their release; the transportation agency that runs the buses; and county commissioners who allocate funding. “They haven’t done a damn thing about it,” he said.
Hank Hughes, one of five current Santa Fe County commissioners, acknowledged that officials have largely been unsuccessful at making it safer for people to get back to town, but he said other issues, including trying to reduce overdoses at the jail, have taken precedence.
“It is an issue, but it’s one of many issues about people in jail,” he said.
Buses now stop there in the afternoon, but the jail often releases people after they have come and gone. On a recent day, a bus waited about 15 minutes and departed without picking up any inmates. About half an hour later, 10 or so people were released from the jail. Some had rides. Others began to walk.
Derek Williams, the jail warden, said jail officials ask inmates if they need a ride toward town and inform them that they can wait for an officer to drive them in a transport van.
But in interviews, several people recently released from the jail said that they had to wait up to several hours, sometimes in harsh weather conditions, for the transport van. One man who was walking back from the jail said in Spanish that he did not know that a van was available.
Mr. Williams said it was unfortunate that released inmates had to wait until an officer is freed up to drive them toward town. He said people are allowed a phone call when they are released. The “vast majority” of the time, he said, inmates decline a ride from the jail and either walk or are picked up by a friend or relative.
Among the walkers one evening this year was James Moore, who said he had made the same trek a handful of times after being released, often in the dark. The worst, he recalled, was about four years ago, when he had fresh staples in his knee after a car crash.
“I was hobbling along the road in the dark, with blood going down my leg,” he said. It took him about seven and a half hours to get home that time, he said.
Joe Madrid, 35, said he had done the walk as many as 25 times over the years, and that he often worried that drivers would not be able to see him. He said he has had several close calls and could remember feeling the wind from cars that passed too closely.
“People are flying by you at like 60, 70-some miles an hour,” Mr. Madrid said. “Some of them turn their brights on just to be able to see you.”
It was late at night in March 2020 when Kevin Poirier walked across the highway to a neighboring state prison and asked a security guard if he could cash a jail-issued check there. He had just been released after being arrested for failing to appear for a court hearing, according to jail records. The guard at the prison told him he needed to leave and, shortly after, heard a “loud thump” from the highway, according to a police report. A truck had fatally hit Mr. Poirier and the driver had fled the scene.
Then, in December of that year, Andrew Ortiz was released after one night in jail. Mr. Ortiz, 58, had fallen on hard times, according to Henrietta Cordova, his partner before the couple separated. She said he had become addicted to drugs and had begun hearing things.
Mr. Ortiz was released in the afternoon and was dead within about two hours. A woman driving an S.U.V. struck him about three miles north of the jail.
“I blame the jail a lot for them just letting people like that go on their own,” Ms. Cordova said. “If you’re in somebody’s custody and you can see that they’re mentally not well, why would you just open the door and say ‘Go,’ instead of getting ahold of family members and making sure they get where they’re going safely?”
There have been problems even when someone has elected to wait for the transport van. The van often deposits inmates about six miles north, at a bus stop, the jail warden said. It is within city limits but still far from the homeless shelter or other places where people are often trying to go, and the buses run only into the early evening.
On the night of Feb. 27, an officer dropped a released inmate, Chris Vigil, near a hospital, the warden said. It was more than seven miles from the house where Mr. Vigil lived with his aunt.
“I don’t know what happened after that,” the warden said.
Mr. Vigil, 46, had spent less than 24 hours in jail for not showing up to court to face an old charge of drinking in a park.
Not long after he was dropped off, he was struck by at least one car, and his body was found near an exit ramp of a highway. A police report said a station wagon and a large truck were involved in the crash and that neither driver was at fault.
Mr. Vigil’s aunt, Barbara Ortiz, said he may not have had his glasses, and that he was nearly blind without them.
Ms. Jaramillo, who was struck by the sheriff’s deputy in 2021, had once worked as a correctional officer herself at a jail not too far away before falling on harder times. She had been booked into the jail for trespassing at a homeless shelter that banned her. A police report from the crash said she had been walking in the middle of a lane on the highway.
Her sister, Elizabeth Jaramillo, said she does not understand why people are released so late and allowed to walk. In an interview, she and her father, Alfredo, rattled off the many solutions they had come up with to make the releases safer. Among them were having an advocacy group transport people to town, extending the sidewalk to the jail, billing inmates for a ride to their home or even just giving people reflective vests if they are walking at night.
“It’s just baffling to me,” she said, “that somebody somewhere hasn’t made sense of it yet, or figured out a way to get it done.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
