Christ Yoder
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Mental health experts gave conflicting testimony during the third day of Jordan Nuñez’s sentencing hearing about the impact of his traumatic childhood on his ability to resist the assassination of 13-year-old Jeremiah Valencia .
Nuñez’s father, Thomas Ferguson, has been accused of beating and torturing the boy, the son of Ferguson’s girlfriend, to death in 2017, but Ferguson committed suicide in prison in 2018 before being tried.
Prosecutors then focused on Nuñez, claiming he was a willing accomplice in the boy’s brutal torture by his father and the burial of Jeremiah’s broken body in a plastic tub along a national road near the family home in Nambé.
According to police reports, the boy was tortured before his death, forced to wear adult diapers and kept for days in a kennel – which Nuñez is accused of having violently run over, causing Jeremiah’s death.
Nuñez pleaded guilty in 2020 to child abuse and falsifying evidence of his role in the crime, and he faces up to 24 years in prison.
His defense attorneys contend that Nuñez was so traumatized by his own abuse at Ferguson’s hands that he lacked the capacity to resist his father’s invitation to participate in Jeremiah’s abuse or to ask for it. help to the authorities.
They say he should not receive a harsher sentence than Jeremiah’s own mother, Tracy Ann Peña, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to one count of child abuse resulting in death and three counts of conspiracy for trafficking of methamphetamine in the case. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
California child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey Rowe Рa defense witness Рsaid Nu̱ez suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder brought on by an abusive and neglectful childhood. who included being state detained between the ages of 6 and 9, which delayed his cognitive abilities and made it impossible for him to stand up to his father.
“All of this neurodevelopment happens in the first six years of life,†Rowe said. “If you don’t live in a good house… things go wrong… and you end up with self-regulation issues.
He added that Nuñez and his four siblings had the kind of childhood that leads to “complex trauma” later in life.
According to testimony presented in court, Ferguson punched Nuñez in the stomach when he was just an infant, rubbed dog feces on his face and abused his mother in front of him.
“’People who love me hurt me too’ was a big theme in her life,†Rowe said.
Nuñez received extensive counseling early in his life, as evidenced by records from the Texas Child Welfare System, where he lived for a time with his grandparents and four siblings.
But Rowe said the treatment was uneven, rambling, and focused only on behavior modification – not repairing the damage that had already been done to his psyche.
Nuñez, who is 23 now but was 19 when Jeremiah died, lived in 11 different homes in his first 11 years of life, Rowe said.
Prosecution witness Dr David Salsberg, a clinical pediatric neuropsychologist from New York, took issue with Rowe’s diagnosis of PTSD and the extent to which Nunez’s childhood prevented him from opposing his father or getting help for Jeremiah.
Salsberg said his assessment of Nuñez was limited by the fact that he was not allowed to administer certain tests related to personality disorders and psychopathology, but he said he disagreed that Nuñez was suffering from PTSD because it did not meet the diagnostic criteria.
Salsberg said that although Nuñez reported a few “flashbacks†of his abuse as a child, he did not claim to have had persistent and intrusive thoughts about the abuse.
Nuñez also did not show “avoidance” of the people or places that caused his alleged trauma, Salsberg said, adding that he had voluntarily chosen to leave his grandparents’ home in Texas. at age 18 to find his father in New Mexico.
Even though Nuñez suffered from PTSD, Salsberg said, he also had enough protective factors – like his close relationship with his younger sisters – to assume he wasn’t fully in control of what had happened in his past. .
Prosecutors also pointed to times when Nuñez allegedly discussed or challenged his father in the past.
“I see enough times when PTSD wasn’t driving all aspects of his behavior and preventing him from doing anything,†Salsberg said. “He was a young adult; he was 18 years old. He had access to leave, he had access to a telephone, he had stood up to [Ferguson] before.”
Salsberg said Nuñez might even have been better equipped to ask for help for Jeremiah than his own mother.
“Certainly he was in a state, in my professional opinion, to have the capacity to do more than a currently abused woman who takes heroin most of the time,†Salsberg said, referring to Peña.
Jeremiah’s father is expected to testify on Friday.
The Nunez defense team did not say whether he would go to court before being sentenced. If he decides he wants to speak, state District Judge Matthew Wilson said “he will have the last word.”
