Gruesome details in torture, slaying of N.M. boy found buried beside road
SANTA FE, N.M. -- New court documents indicate a boy found buried along the side of a rural New Mexico highway in January may have been raped and burned before he was killed, according to reports by CBS affiliate KRQE. Authorities say the 13-year-old endured years of abuse, and had not attended school in several months.
The lead suspect in the murder of young Jeremiah Valencia is his mother's boyfriend, who allegedly tortured the boy so severely that he needed to walk with a cane, according to court records obtained by the station.
"He was placed in a dog kennel for hours on end without food," investigators told reporters in January.
Thomas Wayne Ferguson, 42, was indicted last week on first-degree murder and 17 other felony counts related to the boy's death. Police believe he beat Jeremiah to death while his mother, Tracy Pena, was in jail on a warrant for failing to appear in court.
According to arrest warrants, Jeremiah's sister told deputies that Ferguson and his 19-year-old son Jordan Nunez put her dead brother in a bathtub at the family's Nambe Pueblo home to clean the blood off of him before disposing of his body last November.
The documents reference the child's autopsy report and say and that his body had lacerations consistent with sexual assault, KRQE reports. In addition, they said he "had possibly been burned" and he was found wearing a diaper.
Prosecutors have not yet confirmed whether Jeremiah had also been sexually assaulted before his death, but say that more charges may be filed depending on evidence, the station reports.
Deputies also wrote in affidavits obtained by the station that in a search of the home where the boy lived, "blood not visible to the naked eye" was found in both Jeremiah's bedroom and Ferguson's.
Jeremiah Valencia's mother, Tracy Pena, pulled him out of a Las Vegas, New Mexico, middle school in February 2017 and told school officials she would enroll him in a Santa Fe school. But she never did and school and state officials did not notice, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
Jeremiah had been out of school for at least seven months before he died, police said.
Authorities did not discover the 13-year-old's body until two months after his estimated death in November because no one reported the boy missing, they said.
Authorities learned about the boy's murder in January when Pena told another county jail inmate about her son's death and named Ferguson as the person who killed him.
The inmate shared the information with sheriff's investigators.
Pena and Nunez, the boy's brother, have been charged with child abuse resulting in death and evidence tampering counts, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Under state law, parents are required to enroll children between the ages of 5 and 18 in school. However, there is no specific state official responsible for ensuring that happens when students are transferred between districts or taken from a public school to a private or charter school.
The New Mexico Public Education Department tracks dropout rates and other statistics, but does not follow up when students vanish from the education system, spokeswoman Lida Alikhani said in an email.
"The state is not required to intervene with any individual student," she said. "That responsibility lies on the school or district."
In Jeremiah's case, West Las Vegas Middle School officials believed the teen had been transferred to Capshaw Middle School because a code showed that he was a student there, said Christopher Gutierrez, the superintendent for the Las Vegas district.
Records show a preliminary registration form had been filled out for the boy, but he never became a student, said Jeff Gephart, a spokesman for Santa Fe Public Schools.
Gutierrez told The New Mexican that staff members did their due diligence when they tried to follow up on the boy, but said he has implemented changes following his death.
"Some of the things I see (are) that we need to communicate a little more," Gutierrez said. "Different people have different roles to play when it comes to transferring (records) or accepting transfer slips. We need to make sure that everybody is crossing their t's and dotting their i's."