Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Staff at the Children, Youth and Families Division called police about 8:30 a.m. Thursday to report that a client believed her husband has been storing child pornography on their home computer and sexually molesting her 12-year-old daughter. The mother reported that her husband has left her and she has obtained a restraining order against her husband, but the sheriff has been unable to locate him to serve the order. The mother turned in the computer equipment to police for review. • • • A Clovis business owner called polic... Full story
A radar control screen monitors airplane activity on Friday in the radar control room at Cannon Air Force Base. (CNJ staff photo by Eric Kluth) CANNON AIR FORCE BASE — F-16 fighter pilots twirl at jet speed, practicing dogfights and bombing runs. Private civilian pilots slowly move across the landscape in their propeller-driven planes. And all of their movements are carefully watched by a group of uniformed airmen huddled in a dark room across from the control tower at Cannon Air Force Base. With no windows to look out, t... Full story
About 1:30 p.m. Monday, police responded to the apartment office at 1000 N. MLK regarding a woman who had been attacked several days earlier. The woman told police she had left her car and begun to walk to her apartment when she noticed three males following her. She tried to run up the stairs but they caught her at her apartment door and tried to take her purse before they were run off by another male who appeared on the scene. • • • Police stopped a 1991 Buick Century about 7 p.m. Monday for driving without headl... Full story
Baptist church presenting 'Beyond My Fault' this holiday. When David Walstad, minister of music and senior adults at Parkland Baptist Church in Clovis, was studying music in seminary, he and his wife chose to attend a large church near Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. That decision was partly because they’d never been members of a large church before, but also because he wanted to see how a large church does musical programs. “We saw that what a large church could do would be able to be sca...
About noon Jan. 19, high school security staff called Clovis police regarding a public fight at the 1500 block of Reid. Upon arrival, police noticed a group of students jumping the fence into an adjacent apartment complex that was posted for no trespassing. Police arrested four students for criminal trespass and transported them to the Curry County Juvenile Detention Center. • • • About 1 p.m. Jan. 19, police responded to a junior high school where a teacher had called for assistance about 9:20 a.m. to break up a fight betwee...
Clovis police officials detain people for questioning in the 500 block of Sheldon Street Wednesday during a raid. CNJ staff photo: Eric Kluth. A Clovis Police Department SWAT team on Wednesday picked up the last of three suspects wanted in connection with a February shooting. Josh Martinez, 19, was arrested without incident about 3:30 p.m. in the home of friends living at the 500 block of Sheldon, Detective Keith Farkas said. Martinez faces charges of accessory to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, accessory to...
A 21-year-old Clovis man is being held on murder charges in connection with Monday night’s shooting of two Clovis men, one of whom died at the scene. Mark Madrid faces an open count of murder in connection with the shooting death of Porfirio “Po” Gonzalez, 53, police said. Madrid also faces charges in connection with the wounding of Ernic Perez, 28. Curry County Adult Detention Center officials said Madrid was being held in lieu of a $100,000 cash-only bond. Police dispatchers received calls that shots had been fired at th...
A scholarship fund started five years ago in memory of the former owner of High Plains Federal Credit Union received more than $1,200 due to donations and silent auction receipts at the credit union’s annual meeting on Saturday. According to Daniel Lofton, marketing director for the credit union, the Raymond McClain Scholarship is given each year to two credit union members who are planning to attend an accredited vocational or technical school, college, or university. In past years the fund has raised enough to award two $... Full story
Staff at a Clovis alternative school called police about 6:30 p.m. March 17 to report that five females left on foot and had not been seen since 5:45 p.m. Police took down the names and descriptions of the five girls, aged 13 through 17, and filed a missing persons report. • • • About 3:15 a.m. Thursday, officers received 11 different reports of shots fired at the 100 block of Park Street. Police found two intoxicated men who at first denied shooting a gun and said they had been shooting fireworks, but one finally said both... Full story
It’s been a year since the war in Iraq began. While many servicemembers assigned to the initial assault have rotated back home, some are still deployed in Iraq, some have been sent there more recently and others have just recently returned. Here are some of their stories. --- Julian Urioste, a senior airman assigned to Warner Robbins Air Force Base near Macon, Ga., got a foreign trip right after Thanksgiving, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force — a 90-day deployment to Iraq. That meant he missed spending Christmas and New Year’s D...
FRIONA — Law enforcement officers from throughout the area were joined here Saturday night by a SWAT team from Amarillo in response to a hostage standoff involving a local church pastor. Cpl. John Gonzalez of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Community Relations Office said the incident began between 4 and 4:30 p.m. CST with a traffic stop in Plainview, Texas. The suspect, tentatively identified as a Muleshoe resident, got out of his vehicle with a rifle, at which time Trooper Eustacio Galvan took cover, Gonzalez sai...
A Spanish-speaking pastor raised by missionaries in Central America will be the first executive director in charge of turning the abandoned Clovis Memorial Hospital into a community ministry resource center. The steering committee for the Matt. 25 project voted Monday night to name the Rev. Steve Brown, 37, a licensed pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, to head up the project. In addition to nearly nine years of pastoral experience, Brown has spent 17 years working in the construction industry doing both new construction...
An airman from Cannon Air Force Base called Clovis police about 6 p.m. March 12 to report the theft of his checkbook while on temporary duty in Saudi Arabia between Jan. 1 and March 8. The airman told police he had left the checkbook in his tent in Saudi Arabia and, since January, his account had been used by a person who has since left the Air Force to make Internet purchases worth about $500. The airman said does not know where the person is living but may be in New Mexico or Texas. • • • About 3:40 p.m. Saturday, polic... Full story
Sheila Lunsford, founder of “Women of Praise,” said the lord gave her a vision for the group, which is a Christian fellowship group mostly composed of military spouses. CNJ staff photo: Eric Kluth. Regular moves come with the territory when women marry husbands in the military, but Sheila Lunsford said she views meeting new people as an opportunity. “I don’t have a shy bone in my body,” Lunsford said while sitting on a sofa in her living room in military housing at Cannon Air Force Base and gesturing to a cabinet filled wi... Full story
When Larry Tedrow, the pastor of Central Christian Church, explains his fellowship of churches to others, he sometimes calls it a “nondenominational denomination.” “ I think one of the things people will find is the distinctive approach that we are trying to be Christians only, not the only Christians,” Tedrow said. “We would say, ‘Why be a hyphenated Christian? Just be a Christian and let it go at that.’” Members of 36 independent Christian churches from all over the state will gather this weekend in Clovis for the annual... Full story
Someone stole three semi tractors and two trailers from area businesses in the past week, according to Curry County Sheriff Roger Hatcher and Texico Police Chief John Mares. Unlike private vehicles which usually bring only a few thousand dollars if cut up and sold for parts, Hatcher said semis can bring tens of thousands of dollars to truck thieves. Truck thefts don’t occur more often because of a higher likelihood of detection, he said, and the last one in Curry County was about five years ago. “The thing is there is a goo...
Clovis police want to find the man responsible for robbing a pizza delivery driver Sunday afternoon. According to police reports, a 25-year-old driver for Pizza Hut received an order about 3:30 p.m. to deliver a pizza to an address on Connie Lane. While he was knocking on the front door, two men wearing black hooded coats, baggy jeans and bandanas over their faces approached him and tried to take his money and pizza. The man told police he tried to run back to his car but before he could close it, one of the men pried the...
About 6:30 p.m. March 9, staff at a Clovis alternative school called police regarding a client punching holes in the walls. Police said they would refer the case to the probation officer of the 16-year-old girl, and school staff said they would take the matter up with the school director. • • • Shortly after noon on March 10, two people were transported by ambulance to Plains Regional Medical Center for injuries following a crash on the corner of LaFonda and John Doe streets. The driver of a 1992 Honda said he was south...
Gattis Junior High School students await permission to return to their classrooms Monday after being evacuated for a fire alarm. CNJ staff photo: Loretta Kos. Leftover damage from an earlier lightning strike knocked out power to more than a thousand students and staff at two schools Monday morning, and also shut down a health clinic and the county health department. Manuel Molina, principal of Gattis Junior High School, said he decided to evacuate Gattis about 9 a.m. as a precaution after noticing a smell of smoke in the...
After Lynn Madera and her husband worked all evening March 2 to help another person pack a trailer they were moving to Arizona, she put her 33-month-old daughter in their car seat with the engine running — and then found the doors were locked with no spare key available. “So here we are out in the storm with my daughter locked in and the car running,” Madera said. “My husband tried prying the door and using hangars and other things to try to unlock it. I tried to talk my daughter out of her car seat to unlock the door. N...
CANNON AIR FORCE BASE — They don’t usually wear uniforms. They don’t identify themselves by rank. They don’t allow their photographs to be taken. Most of the time, they’re operating without a lot of public fanfare, and that’s the way they want it. But in February, that veil of anonymity lifted a bit when OSI Detachment 224 — the Office of Special Investigations unit at Cannon — won the Air Force’s annual award for being the best small OSI detachment assigned to Air Combat Command. OSI commander Robert LoMurro said that...
Samplings of recent calls received by Clovis-area law enforcement officers, according to reports: Police arrested a man at the 400 block of West Seventh Street for fraud greater than $250 after three of his checks to a Clovis pawn shop failed to clear the bank. The 22-year-old Clovis man faces misdemeanor and felony charges for the incident. • • • A Clovis high school teacher called police about 8:30 a.m. Monday regarding a fight between two junior high students on high school property. The teacher said each had taken items...
Cops and Courts The case of Timothy Michael Burke, 51, accused of shooting Detective Keith Bessette of the Clovis Police Department in 2002, had been set for jury trial on Wednesday but has been postponed to an undetermined date. According to 9th Judicial District Attorney Brett Carter, the case was postponed due to difficulties in bringing Burke to Clovis for trial. Due to injuries suffered when officers returned fire, Burke is confined to a hospital bed, cannot use his legs nor one of his arms, and bringing him to Clovis...
Rain drops form on a windshield as a car prepares to turn left on Prince Street from Seventh Street in the rain Friday. (Eric Kluth/Clovis News Journal) Clovis is on track to have record rainfall reports for the first quarter of the year, according to National Weather Service officials in Albuquerque. “February turned out to be the second-wettest on record going back to 1911, even though January was a dry month and below normal,” said meteorologist Kerry Jones. “Even if you don’t get any more precipitation for the rest of... Full story
Dispatch supervisor Lorri Williams shares a laugh with Chief Deputy Wayne Grueben at Saturday’s open house for the new Parmer County Jail. CNJ staff photo: Darrell Todd Maurina. FARWELL — They’ll only be moving a few dozen yards across a driveway, but deputies, dispatchers, and jail staff are ecstatic about their impending relocation to a brand new jail and sheriff’s department administration building, according to Chief Deputy Wayne Grueben of the Parmer County Sheriff’s Office. Grueben and other deputies gave guided to...
