District leaders discuss unintended releases of prisoners in MDC

ALBUQUERQUE, NM – When police officers in our community arrest suspects and take them to jail, we expect them to stay there until the court decides otherwise. It's an important part of how our criminal justice system works.

But last month, Metropolitan Detention Center officials accidentally released suspects – not once, not twice, but three times. Getting those suspects back into custody wasn't exactly easy.

KOB 4 received some answers from the prison administration on Wednesday regarding these rather serious errors.

Prison officials have largely blamed human error, which is particularly worrying given that the three suspects accidentally released are facing drug charges, aggravated assault and armed robbery.

An MDC spokesman said an employee accidentally released Anthony Jaramillo on July 3. He is now facing drug charges after Bernalillo County officials reportedly found him unconscious with meth in a car.

The spokesman said the prison official made a clerical error and Jaramillo was released.

The spokesperson said this was the second time this employee had accidentally released an inmate, and the employee took full responsibility for the error. The employee was disciplined but not fired.

On July 17, another prison employee accidentally released Ashante Pierotti before he was transferred to pretrial detention. He faces a charge of grievous bodily harm against a family member.

According to the spokesperson, the employee made a human error and took full responsibility for it. The employee was disciplined but not fired.

According to official information, Pierotti returned to be placed in pre-trial detention.

A week later, on July 24, another prison employee accidentally released Desiree Sanchez, who is accused of armed robbery and aggravated assault.

The spokesperson says this case is still under investigation, but we do know that Sanchez called 911 to turn herself in a few days after her accidental release.

How could all this happen? That's what prison officials had to explain to the Bernalillo County Correctional Facility Advisory Board on Wednesday evening.

The new head of the MDC – who has only been in office since June – announced that a policy requiring supervisors' signatures on all dismissals was abolished in 2020. This means there was no one to track down these human errors.

“There was a question as to why the administrator in charge made such a decision in 2020. I cannot reasonably comment on that. All I can tell you is that the decision after we saw this was to immediately fix it and eliminate it. We will review the records again with two eyes for accuracy to make sure something like this does not happen again,” said Steven Kai Smith, director of the Metropolitan Detention Center.

But it happened again. A spokesperson confirmed that the two-eyes rule was reinstated on July 18, the day after the second accidental release. That means it was in effect during the third accidental release as well.

A spokesperson told us that there are other, more complicated issues with this release and they are still investigating, so they can't reveal much at this time.