Something Akin to a Preface
Below you’ll find a link to a YouTube copy of “Death in a Southwest Prison.” The documentary, produced by ABC for their newsmagazine Close-Up, aired on September 23, 1980. This was seven and a half-months after the riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. The piece was filmed five months earlier, in April. Not only is “Death in a Southwest Prison” a great way to catch the very basic outline of the riot, it also happens to be the jumping off point for my book.
More specifically, I’d like to guide you to these sixty-seconds from the doc.
New Mexico is now ranked 38th in population; in 1980, it was home to hardly one-million residents. Word that a national media outlet planned to devote an hour-long primetime look at the riot quickly spread throughout the state. And on 9/23, after a broad overview in Tom Jarriel’s southern drawl, here was Jeffrey Williams in primetime. Jaws all over his hometown, Carlsbad, hit the desert floor.
Jeff Williams’s obituary states his date of death as having been October 14, 1980. Seventeen days after the show aired. 255-days since any official within the Corrections Department; the hospitals in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque; the media in same; his hometown of Carlsbad or his family could determine his whereabouts—his body was found in Ciudad Delicias, Mexico, having suffered from, according to the autopsy performed there, a heart attack and exposure to the elements that had left him unrecognizable. He was twenty-one years old.
Twenty-one is young, even for a drug addict—and Jeff was a known Demerol fiend. Still, the National Institute of Health claims that the average age for a hardcore junkie to experience a hardening of the heart to the point of fatal attack is 46.7 years.
But what’s more clear from “Death in a Southwest Prison” and numerous, other documents I reference in the book, is that somebody had wanted Jeff Williams to die during the riot.
The case has been cold, very cold, for a long time. But in AIN’T NAMING NO NAMES, the case of what happened to Jeff—and to his brother, who disappeared a month later, trying to find Jeff—is used as exemplification for the kind of mayhem in which the entire state found itself after the February 1980 uprising.
AMAZING. I have been researching this case for about five years now. Occasionally, Ill look up names that come up in books and documentaries. Jeff and Gary were very notable. I look forward to reading your book. Thank you, sir.