A man acquitted of murder alleges in a civil rights lawsuit filed this week that police in a southern Colorado city framed him after his girlfriend killed herself in 2014.
A jury found James “Jimmy” Garcia not guilty of murder in his girlfriend’s death in 2023. Now, Garcia is suing the city of Monte Vista, former Chief of Police John Rosecrans, police officer Michael Martinez, former District Attorney Robert Willett and Rio Grande County coroner Stephen Hunzeker for malicious prosecution and wrongful arrest.
“What happened was truly devastating for me,” Garcia said in an emailed statement to The Denver Post on Tuesday. “Being falsely accused caused me immense distress, leaving me deeply depressed and humiliated. … No one should ever have to endure this.”
On March 26, 2014, Garcia found his girlfriend, 23-year-old Jacqueline Jones, dead in their bedroom, according to the lawsuit. Her suicide note was later discovered under the blankets of their bed.
Jones had a history of depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation, the lawsuit stated.
The El Paso County Coroner’s Office, which conducted the autopsy at the request of the Rio Grande Coroner’s Office, said Jones died by suicide and that her death was “deliberate and self-inflicted,” according to the lawsuit. The coroner said there was no evidence she was strangled or otherwise killed by someone else.
Jones’ mother hired a private investigator later that year to “work the investigation from another angle” and find evidence that her daughter’s death was not a suicide, the lawsuit stated.
In 2017, Rosecrans was appointed as Monte Vista’s chief of police and reopened the case, assigning Martinez as head of the fresh investigation.
At that point, according to the lawsuit, Jones’ mother also hired two experts — Richard Eikelenboom and Selma Eikelenboom-Shieveld — who had been publicly discredited. The pair, alongside an unnamed European doctor, conducted their own autopsy that concluded Jones’ death was a homicide.
Eikelenbloom was disqualified from serving as an expert in 2016 after he admitted on the stand in Denver court that he had no direct DNA extraction or analysis experience, that he operates a lab that has not been accredited, that he failed his basic proficiency tests in 2011 and 2012 and that he is “self-trained,” the lawsuit stated.
The El Paso County coroner who initially ruled Jones’ death a suicide reportedly said the new findings were authored by “some whack jobs from Europe” paid by the police department, according to the lawsuit.
Hunzeker, who was appointed as the Rio Grande County coroner in 2017, changed the manner of death on Jones’ death certificate from suicide to “could not be determined” in 2019, more than five years after her death, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Hunzeker knew changing the official cause of death to undetermined would allow law enforcement to arrest and charge Garcia in Jones’ death.
Garcia’s lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, is seeking relief for violations of his Fourth and 14th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, discrimination and malicious prosecution; for being unlawfully arrested without probable cause; and for being denied his due process and a fair trial.
“Monte Vista’s prosecution of (Garcia) was a shocking abuse of power,” said Mari Newman, one of the man’s attorneys. “Monte Vista police and prosecutors ignored the mountains of objective evidence that his girlfriend had committed suicide, and spent years prosecuting a man they knew had committed no crime. This is truly an example of government at its worst.”
As of Tuesday morning, no hearing date had been set, according to federal court records.
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