Family raises questions after release of body camera video from shooting

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Edward Daniel Santana walked down the driveway of his mother’s home in Tesuque with one hand on a bleeding neck wound and another holding a wooden fence post he had slung over his shoulder.

“Go less lethal!” New Mexico State Police Officer Joshua Mejia called out to Santa Fe County deputies.

Deputy Blaine Lattin prepared his Taser and ordered Santana to stop.

In a moment, Santana lunged at Lattin, who fired the Taser just before Deputy Patrick Ficke fired two gunshots.

Santana, already covered in blood, with a handcuff dangling from his wrist, fell to the ground.

Despite the deputies’ attempts to provide medical aid, he did not survive.

Santana’s death on the morning of July 7, outside his mother’s home at 1 Entrada Capulin, is captured on video from Mejia’s body camera. The footage was among a series of videos state police released late Thursday of deputies responding to a relative’s call for help as Santana attacked his mother with knife.

When Mejia arrived, the video shows, deputies were carrying a bench holding 67-year-old Delia Cervantes down the driveway and away from the home, as Santana stood on the porch. Cervantes would later die from her injuries at a local hospital.

Santana went into the house briefly, the video shows, and then came out and grabbed the fence post, wielding it like a bat.

After Santana was struck with the Taser and two gunshots, Ficke and the other deputies watched as he attempted to get up from the ground. He fell again after the Taser was deployed a second time.

Ficke was the first to rush to Santana’s aid.

“He’s still breathing,” the deputy shouted.

Santana’s father, Edward Santana, said he had seen footage of his son’s death on TV news and it “disturbed him.”

“I don’t think they had to shoot him,” he said in an interview Friday. “They were far away from him — did he have to be shot? I think they could have gotten it under control without shooting.”

In an encounter with Edward Daniel Santana before the shooting, Deputy Ian Burr had attempted to take him into custody, but Santana resisted, Ficke later told an investigator.

Video from Meijia’s body camera captured a conversation with Burr after the shooting. “He was complying when I first got here,” Burr said. “I put a handcuff on him. He got up, lunged at me. I tased him twice, but he just kept going.”

During an interview with state police Investigator Cruzita Romero, shown in one of the videos, Ficke said the “complexity of violence” Santana was displaying disturbed him. When he first arrived, Ficke told Romero, he asked Mejia if he carried “bean bags,” referring to a less-lethal round that can fired from a shotgun.

Mejia said he doesn’t carry bean bag rounds.

“The last thing I wanted to do … was to have to go to that option,” Ficke said, speaking of lethal force.

But when Santana began approaching Lattin, Ficke said, he was concerned about Lattin’s safety. The deputies could not back up any farther, he added, because Cervantes was being tended to behind them.

“It really slowed down,” he said in the interview. “I was thinking he was so close to Deputy Lattin, and if he’d hit Deputy Lattin, he probably could’ve taken his head off … or caused great bodily harm.”

Ficke fired twice, with both shots hitting Santana in the chest.

Santana had several injuries, Ficke said: two wounds on his neck, cuts on his wrists and the two gunshots.

Edward Santana said family members are considering hiring an attorney to explore their legal options, though they had not done so by Friday.

When he arrived at the scene, Edward Santana said, Ficke told him his son would “never bother anyone again.”

“He shouldn’t have said that,” the father said.

He and other family members have said Edward Daniel Santana had been struggling with drug use.

“They don’t know how to deal with people that are on a drug or have a mental issue,” his father said, referring to law enforcement. “They don’t give them a chance. It’s a gun right away.”

Ficke said in his interview with Romero he is a licensed mental health therapist and trained as a negotiator. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked as a mental health counselor for Healthy Families of Albuquerque.

The Tesuque incident was the third fatal police shooting in the Santa Fe area, all of which involved drugs, according to reports.