Albuquerque police take on orphaned homicide cases

Feb. 18—Alan Carabajal waited a long time.

In April 2017, his 19-year-old son was found face-down beside his truck near Stardust Skies Park in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights. Jon Paul Carabajal had been shot six times and his pockets were turned out.

Near the crime scene, his father found a bullet casing and handed it to the homicide detective on the case. She told him to go home, she would call him later.

“Never talked to her again,” Carabajal told the Journal.

In November, after more than six years of silence, a police commander called.

“He said, ‘We found the case. It was sitting in the back of the filing cabinet,'” Carbajal said. “The commander goes, ‘I’m sorry… we (expletive) this case up … but I promise you it will get solved.'”

Detectives arrested Marco Martza and Daisy Ortiz, both 26, late last month in the case. The Albuquerque Police Department didn’t respond to questions on the handling of Carabajal’s case.

The homicide was one of several cases — described by APD as “orphaned and abandoned” — that were solved in 2023.

Most of the homicides, of which there are dozens still unsolved, languished after the investigating detective left the unit, sometimes taking the case file with them.

Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said some cases grew stagnant when certain detectives “didn’t have a sense of urgency.”

In many orphaned cases, the lapses in investigation can stretch from months to several years. Sometimes, the case is given to another detective or the original detective is called back to finish it.

“That quickly started to become hundreds and hundreds of victims, families who haven’t gotten answers for how their loved one may have passed or who’s responsible,” Medina said.

To tackle the issue, Medina said APD has enlisted the help of former police.

Six civilian investigators — former Albuquerque officers — have been working a backlog of those cases, making $28 an hour. Medina said the group has reviewed 57 cases since 2022, so far solving 11 of them.

To prevent the backlog from building up again, APD said it has begun a review process of active homicide investigations.

The casework is reviewed two days after the homicide, then there is a 60-day review and, lastly, a six-month review.

APD said policies were also changed so if a homicide detective leaves the unit, the case is transferred to a civilian investigator.

Prosecutors can face their own challenges taking orphaned homicide cases to court.

“In general, the difficulties in taking an older case to trial are that memories fade and witnesses move,” said Nancy Laflin, a spokeswoman for the 2nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

However, Laflin said the case against Martza and Ortiz involves a lot of scientific evidence — much of it gathered in 2017 — and “a partial confession in a jail call.”

Police said Martza called his mother from the Metropolitan Detention Center in January and told her, “if you love me, just throw it away,” referring to items in his cabinet.

Martza told her, “I don’t give a (expletive) no more. Probably should just turn it in … just tell ’em I did it,” according to police. When detectives searched the cabinet, they found two handguns.

‘My baby’s gone’

Over the years, Alan Carabajal said he repeatedly tried to call and tell police what, according to court records, they already knew: that Ortiz and Martza were most likely responsible in his son’s murder.

Within days of the homicide, there was video footage of Martza’s car at the scene and Facebook messages from Ortiz asking to meet Carabajal at the time and place he was killed.

Alan Carabajal said nobody would call him back. He took his gripes to the New Mexico attorney general and district attorney.

“I felt I was letting my son down the whole time. I knew this six years ago and they wouldn’t do nothing,” Carabajal said. “It was like everybody in charge had let me down.”

In 2021, Carabajal’s case was on APD’s Duke City Case Files, a webseries that highlights unsolved homicides.

And time kept passing.

Carabajal said, in November 2023, the commander told him when the initial detective retired she never handed the case off to another.

He said the commander also confirmed something else: Both suspects are believed to have killed another young man in a similar robbery-homicide weeks after his son died.

Court records mention as much and, at the time, Martza told a detective that he had been regularly robbing drug dealers at gunpoint.

On Jan. 26, Martza and Ortiz were charged with murder. Police say Ortiz, an ex-girlfriend of Jon Paul Carabajal, had set him up to be robbed. He ended up being shot to death.

After his son’s death, amid the waiting, Alan Carabajal said his world fell apart.

“It just, everything just went down. And I never asked for any help. All I wanted them to do was solve this case,” he said. “It’s a shame that they had everything but they just wouldn’t take it the next step.”

Carabajal said a year to the day after his son was killed, his mother, Jon Paul’s grandmother, died. He added, “It took the wind out of her man. I mean, she just gave up.”

“My son was my mom’s crutch. Wherever she walked, she had to lean on him,” Carabajal said. “Her last words were, ‘Jon Paul, I’m coming home.’ So, to me, it killed two people in my family.”

Carabajal said he then stepped away from a leadership role at his church, lost his house and his health went downhill, leading to the amputation of part of his foot. He said Jon Paul’s twin sister has an armful of tattoos dedicated to him, but she still has trouble talking about her brother.

Carabajal said his son loved to skateboard and was weighing his options for the future. Now, he thinks back fondly to early mornings spent fishing for walleye at Conchas Lake.

“My baby’s gone. I’ll never have him again,” Carabajal said. “… Jon Paul was, to me, the most awesome son in the world. He was my best friend. And that hurts.”