Fifth Albuquerque police officer submits resignation letter amid DWI inquiry

Mar. 21—One of the more high-profile Albuquerque police officers put on leave amid an FBI investigation into drunken driving case dismissals has resigned after 18 years on the force.

Joshua Montaño quit just days after being asked to give a statement for an Internal Affairs inquiry that was triggered by allegations of corruption within the DWI unit in the past decade.

In Montaño's resignation letter, provided to the Journal by the Albuquerque Police Department, the former officer said that what he got "caught up in" was generational and approved by supervisors.

"Chief (Harold) Medina has made it seem like there are just a few bad officers acting on their own," Montaño wrote in the letter. "This is far from the truth."

APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said the department is looking at others in its internal probe of DWI corruption allegations, including retired officers.

Montaño's attorney in the IA investigation, Thomas Grover, said the resignation letter shows the alleged conduct "didn't happen within a cell or a silo."

The alleged scheme, still under investigation by federal authorities, involved a prominent defense attorney who managed to get dozens of DWI cases dismissed in Metropolitan Court in recent years on technical issues, such as arresting officers failing to show up for interviews or court.

Grover told the Journal earlier Thursday that his client's decision not to give a statement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing.

"Absolutely not," Grover said. "My advice, my counsel, was, 'You can't give a statement. It's patently unfair and inappropriate.'"

APD officers are compelled to submit to IA interviews if requested to do so, but Grover said APD's IA inquiry was "inept because there was so much sloppiness in how they (IA investigators) were issuing target letters," among other issues.

"Because of various defects in the city's investigation, he was left with no choice but to resign," Grover said. "Nothing that I'm saying discounts the expectations that the public has of police officers, but there's even greater expectations of the agencies and departments that lead those officers to do proper and effective Internal Affairs investigations."

Grover pointed to public statements made by Chief Medina and Mayor Tim Keller, who released a statement in January saying, in part, "This investigation involves a handful of long-time officers at APD, going back a decade; if true, what these individuals did is a disgrace to the badge, and erodes faith in law enforcement."

Keller's statement added: "Any individuals who engaged in this conduct will never work for the City again, and should be held accountable to full extent of the law. The department's willingness to drive accountability, especially on its own, reflects how far we have come."

Grover told the Journal, "Here the city and APD's command staff failed my client and, frankly, the citizens, with an investigation that was ... irresponsible because of the public statements by Medina and Keller that essentially made these 'investigations' a sham with preconceived conclusions."

Gallegos, the APD spokesman, responded to Grover's comments late Thursday, saying, "If the investigation was flawed, why did five officers resign?"

'Comfort and support'

Montaño's resignation letter is the only one that has been shared by APD.

In the letter, Montaño said he thought he would get "an opportunity" to tell APD what he knew about the alleged corruption "and how the issues I let myself get caught up in within the DWI Unit were generational."

"I thought there would be a time where I could talk about all the other people who should be on administrative leave as well, but aren't," he wrote in the letter. "That opportunity was denied to me."

Gallegos said Montaño had four opportunities to do so, in scheduled interviews with Internal Affairs investigators. He said Montaño missed every interview, and then resigned.

Grover, Montaño's attorney, said despite the four requests for an IA interview, his client refused to be interviewed "under the conditions they presented."

In the first segment of the resignation letter, Montaño talks about how he "fell in love" with APD, risked his life "on numerous occasions" and did "great and amazing things" for his community as an officer.

Montaño wrote he was "all but abandoned" by APD after he was seriously injured in a crash with a drunken driver in 2022. He wrote that he then found "comfort and support" from his fellow officers in APD's DWI Unit.

"They were my family because they cared for me when others didn't and they supported me when others wouldn't," Montaño wrote. "However, that support came with a high price and on January 18, 2024, I found out what the cost of that support really meant."

That was the date FBI agents raided the home of Montaño's fellow DWI-unit officers Honorio Alba Jr. and Harvey Johnson Jr. as well as the law office of Thomas Clear III and the home of Clear's paralegal, Ricardo Mendez.

The FBI investigation, which has involved the U.S. Department of Justice, has yet to result in any criminal charges. What agents found and their rationale for the searches remain under seal.

Meanwhile, Montaño, Alba, Johnson, officer Nelson Ortiz and Lt. Justin Hunt had been on paid administrative leave since mid-January. Montaño is the last of those to resign.

"When I was put on administrative leave, I thought there would be an opportunity for me to talk to the department about what I knew regarding the FBI's investigation," he wrote in his letter. "In order for me to talk to the City about what I knew, I needed to not be the City's scapegoat for its own failures."

After alleging that other, unidentified APD personnel were involved, Montaño said, "None of (the) allegations against myself or others in the DWI Unit happened without supervisory knowledge. And they didn't just happen over a few years ago."

In the last paragraph, Montaño wrote, "I take responsibility for my actions."

"However, APD's investigations of me have been unfair, and because of Chief Medina's public statements, the outcome of these investigations is already set," he wrote. "Therefore, I have no choice but to hereby resign from my position with APD."

Montaño called the resignation "such a difficult moment for me."

In the final sentence, he wrote that he did not waive his employee benefits, listing out "earned and accrued sick, vacation, or comp time and respectfully request that I be out-processed as any other employee would be upon resigning from the department."

Recent allegations

Montaño was also the officer who was accused in a Feb. 22 Journal article of suggesting a DWI suspect hire attorney Clear.

The suspect, Carlos Sandoval-Smith, told the Journal last month that Montaño arrested him for DWI in June and later telephoned him to say he had the suspect's bracelet in his possession. Montaño told him to go to Clear's Northeast Heights office to pick it up, he said. That's where Sandoval-Smith said he met Mendez, the paralegal, who returned his bracelet.

During that meeting, according to a recording Sandoval-Smith made of the meeting, Mendez told him, "If you need to get off of this, you're at the right place" — for the price of $8,500.

That law office was one of the locations searched by the FBI in January. Sandoval-Smith, meanwhile, didn't hire Clear but sought legal representation from the state Law Office of the Public Defender. His case was dismissed in January.

None of the officers who were suspended have commented publicly. Clear and Mendez haven't returned Journal phone calls.

The federal criminal investigation spurred 2nd Judicial District Attorney Sam Bregman's office to dismiss nearly 200 pending DWI cases filed by the suspended officers, whose credibility could have been challenged in court because of the ongoing FBI investigation.

The four other officers who have resigned during the Internal Affairs investigation are: Hunt, who started at APD in 2000 and resigned on Feb. 7; Alba, who started at APD in 2014 and resigned on Feb. 29; Johnson, who started at APD in 2014 and resigned on March 13; and Ortiz, who started at APD in 2016 and resigned on March 15.