Judge Holds Sheriff's Department 30 Percent Liable in Death of Man Hit by Speeding Jail Officer

On the night of August 21, 2004, Jason Wachocki, 22, finished his weekend shift on the fire and safety crew at Sandia Motor Speedway west of Albuquerque and drove east on Speedway Boulevard. At 10:58 p.m. he stopped at the T-intersection with Shelly Road, the two-lane road that serves the race track, the Albuquerque Solid Waste Management Department and the Metropolitan Detention Center. As he pulled through, a van came out of the dark with its headlights off. Willie Hiley, a jail corrections officer headed to the graveyard shift, ran the stop sign at more than 75 miles per hour, almost twice the posted limit. Jason died at the scene.

His parents, Michael and Tia Wachocki, sued as personal representatives of his estate, and his brother Bill joined the claim. They did not stop at the driver. They sued the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department, which was responsible for patrolling Shelly Road. The case was tried to a judge in Bernalillo County District Court, without a jury, with Randi McGinn and A. Elicia Montoya representing the family.

The evidence showed that the Sheriff's Department had been warned for years. A solid waste supervisor reported a 'very serious traffic situation' on the road in 2000. After the jail opened in 2003 and brought 75 to 100 employees to each of three shifts, the jail director, the race track's general manager (who phoned in complaints about twenty times) and Jason's own boss at the track all asked for enforcement. Solid waste safety officers clocked vehicles at 51 to 111 miles per hour in the 45 zone, and documented 192 violations over five days, most by law enforcement or corrections officers. In the fourteen months between the jail opening and Jason's death, the Department wrote three speeding citations and one warning for the stop sign where he died. Sheriff Darren White testified that where traffic laws go unenforced, drivers speed and crashes become more frequent and more severe.

District Judge Linda Vanzi found Hiley 70 percent at fault and the Sheriff's Department 30 percent, concluding that the Department negligently failed to enforce traffic laws against its own deputies and jail officers and ignored citizen complaints. She found no comparative fault on Jason's part. She set total compensatory damages for his death at $3,707,563.82, which put the Department's share at $1,112,269.15. The New Mexico Tort Claims Act limited a single claimant's recovery from a governmental entity to $400,000 at the time, so the judgment entered against the Department was $400,000.

Both sides appealed. The Department challenged the immunity ruling, and the family argued that the cap had become unconstitutional because it had never been adjusted for inflation. The Court of Appeals affirmed on November 24, 2009. It held that the failure to enforce traffic laws fell within the Act's waiver of immunity for law enforcement officers, and that the cap still bears a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose. It also rejected Bill Wachocki's separate claim for loss of consortium, finding that eight months as roommates did not show the kind of mutual dependence the claim requires.

The New Mexico Supreme Court granted review of the brother's claim alone. On October 11, 2011, it held that a sibling can recover for loss of consortium in New Mexico, but agreed that these facts did not show the mutual dependence the claim requires, and affirmed.