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Copyright © 2021 Albuquerque Journal

Tabitha Clay said her troubles with the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office began after the Rio Grande Sun reporter wrote an article in May 2019 about a deputy using a Taser on a 15-year-old special-needs student at an Española school.

Rio Arriba County Sheriff James Lujan

The article and a lapel camera video of the incident quickly became the focus of national media reports leading to the deputy’s arrest on felony charges.

“I felt like when it got picked up by national news, that’s when people got unhappy with me,” Clay said this week in a phone interview from Colorado.

The former reporter and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit this week against the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office alleging that Sheriff James Lujan and his deputies attempted to intimidate and harass Clay in response to that article and others critical of the department.

Lujan, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to multiple phone messages left at his office this week.

“It was pretty scary, honestly,” Clay said of her interactions with the Rio Arriba Sheriff’s Office in 2019.

“It was traumatic,” Clay recalled. “I didn’t realize when I was going through it how traumatic it was.”

She left the Rio Grande Sun in October 2019 to care for a family member, she said.

Clay wrote an article published in the Rio Grande Sun in May 2019 reporting that then-Deputy Jeremy Barnes used a stun gun on a 15-year-old special-needs student at Española Valley High School. Attorney General Hector Baldaras charged Barnes in September 2019 with child abuse, aggravated battery and false imprisonment in connection with the incident. His trial on the felony charges is scheduled to begin Aug. 16 in 1st Judicial District Court.

The lawsuit alleges that just days after publication of the article, Sheriff Lujan directed employees not to speak to Clay and to withhold sheriff’s office records, which she previously had accessed routinely.

This was followed by encounters with sheriff’s deputies that Clay described as harassing and intimidating.

When Clay arrived at the scene of a fatal crash in July 2019, Barnes approached her outside the crime-scene perimeter, threatened to arrest her and yelled for someone to get him handcuffs, the suit alleges.

Clay said she felt threatened with arrest or battery and left the scene.

On Sept. 12, 2019, Clay said she returned to her apartment and found Barnes and a second deputy parked in front of her complex, the suit alleges. The deputies had no official business at the complex, which was outside Rio Arriba County, and eventually departed, it said.

The suit alleges that the deputies had intended to intimidate Clay and demonstrate that they knew where she lived.

Barnes, who is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, was fired from the Rio Arriba Sheriff’s Office in September 2019. A voice message left Friday with Barnes’s attorney, Thomas Clark of Santa Fe, was not immediately returned.

The family of the boy involved in the Tasing incident reached a $1.3 million settlement in 2020 with Rio Arriba County and Española Public Schools.

Four days after the incident at the apartment complex, deputies refused to allow Clay to enter the Rio Arriba County Courthouse with a phone, laptop and camera that she habitually brought to court, the suit alleges.

When a bailiff told deputies that a judge was allowing Clay to enter with her equipment, the deputies told the bailiff that “the judge was not in charge downstairs” and that she would need to speak with Sheriff Lujan, the suit alleges. Clay later was allowed to enter the courthouse with her equipment.

The lawsuit alleges that Clay has suffered emotional distress as a result of her experiences with the sheriff’s office and is asking for unspecified damages to be determined at trial.