2016/03/27
Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project
Santa Fe, NM — Just after 1 am on Nov. 7, 2013, New Mexico State Police Officer Oliver Wilson saw Jeanette Anaya turn right through a green light from Alta Vista Street onto St. Francis Drive. Wilson claimed Anaya had committed a traffic violation, although the video does not appear to show one.
Anaya made the choice not to stop for Wilson and a chase ensued. However, the chase was so highly questionable that Santa Fe police refused to join in the pursuit. Wilson pursued Anaya at speeds topping 87 mph as she drove to her parents’ home.
Before she reached her home, Wilson caused Anaya’s vehicle to spin out. It was at this moment where the ‘official’ account differs from eye-witness account — and the dashcam. Inside Anaya’s car that night was her friend Jeremy Muñoz, who tells a different story than police.
After causing the car to spin out, Wilson, who’d been a cop for only 18 months, jumped out of his car, and this is where the incident took a quick turn for the worse. According to the Santa Fe Reporter,
Wilson testified that he got out of his patrol car and walked toward Jeanette’s Honda. According to his testimony, she reversed toward him, and fearing for his safety, he began firing. She then began to drive away, and Wilson kept firing as he ran alongside the Honda, emptying his magazine. A few seconds later, the Honda crashed into a cinder block wall.
Each of the other state police officers who testified about the shooting repeated Wilson’s story.
Muñoz described the sequence differently. He said Jeanette backed into Wilson’s police car in an attempt to position her vehicle for an escape. The officer did not begin firing until Jeanette was driving away from him, he told the grand jury.
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Although a portion of the incident happens off camera, the audio, video, and bullet trajectory report prepared by the state police backup Muñoz’s side of the story.+
The hard to watch dashcam footage shows Wilson running after the fleeing car, dumping round after round into Anaya until she came crashing to a stop — dead.
Wilson fired 16 rounds into the car that night. One of the bullets went through the side of Jeanette’s head; another struck the top of her back.
We would later find out that Anaya had a warrant for her arrest on a misdemeanor charge of concealing her identity and during the grand jury hearing for Wilson, the court would use a toxicology report to reveal that Anaya had cocaine in her system. However, as SFR reports, in an interview with SFR and NMID, Dr. Harry A Milman, consulting toxicologist and president of ToxNetwork.com, characterized the amount of cocaine in Jeanette’s system as “small.” Milman said it wasn’t enough to make any characterizations about Jeanette’s behavior the night of the shooting, when she took the cocaine or how frequently she used the drug.
But these two nearly insignificant facets, along with the fact that the New Mexico judicial system is rigged in such a manner as to almost never indict police officers, Wilson was never punished.
“We thought, well, good, it’s going before a grand jury,” Teresa Anaya, Jeanette’s sister said in an emotional interview last week. “I thought, OK, this is going to be easy—they’re going to charge the officer. But it didn’t happen that way.”
In spite of all the compelling evidence, including a video that showed officer Wilson firing at the fleeing vehicle, the jury was forced to decline the indictment.
“I was blaming the grand jury for the longest time,” Teresa says. “Then we realized that the justice system is very corrupt. The justice system, they let us down. They let us down. It was wrong. … It was never up to the grand jury.
It was all up to the state police investigation and Angela Pacheco. I blame them, and I blame the system for allowing this to happen.”+
Below is the dashcam video, watch as officer Wilson chases after the fleeing car while firing off over a dozen rounds. His life was not in danger, yet he continued to fire.
According to a department spokesperson, Wilson is still on the police force.