A federal judge is set to rule any day now on whether the board of supervisors for Cochise and Santa Cruz counties will be dismissed from a wrongful death lawsuit filed earlier this year involving the in-custody death of a murder suspect.
Aaron Michael Estrada-Buelna of Nogales was found hanging and unresponsive in his Cochise County jail cell shortly before 2 a.m. Feb. 22, 2020. He died the next day at a Tucson hospital.
Estrada-Buelna, 29, was arrested in Nogales on Dec. 9, 2019 for the kidnap and murder of Berenice Aguirre, 31, the mother of his infant son. The boy was held hostage for several hours but was eventually released unharmed.
Court records show Estrada-Buelna’s family alleges that after a Santa Cruz County judge set Estrada-Buelna’s bail at $3 million, he was driven to suicide after being subjected to emotional and physical maltreatment, first in the Santa Cruz County jail and then in Cochise County.
Estrada-Buelna had been transferred to Cochise County at the request of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. The driving force behind the jail transfer appears to have been Estrada-Buelna’s 2011 conviction for threatening to have seven Nogales area police officers “murdered, disappeared, or decapitated” by the Cartel.
The family initially submitted a $7 million notice of claim to both counties, alleging “extreme deliberate indifference” toward Estrada-Buelna’s safety. When the claim was denied, the family’s attorney Homero Torralba filed a lawsuit in state court in May of this year.
Days later, Tucson-based attorney Daryl Audilett had the case transferred to U.S. District Court at the request of all the defendants. Audilett is assigned to the case on behalf of the Arizona Counties Insurance Pool.
Then in June, the two county boards called on U.S. District Court Judge Scott Rash to dismiss the supervisors as defendants. The motion argues that in Arizona, the elected county sheriff -and not the county board of supervisors- is the legal jural entity ultimately responsible for jail operations.
Rash has received pleadings from all the parties and could rule any day on the motion to dismiss. The judge’s decision will not change the fact that Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels and former Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada will remain as defendants in the family’s lawsuit.
The sheriffs have already filed their formal answers to the lawsuit, denying all allegations of wrongdoing, tortious conduct, and violation of civil rights as contained in the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Buelna’s family agreed last month to dismiss Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich as a defendant. Brnovich’s staff had already filed a motion in support of dismissal, alleging the Attorney General and State of Arizona were not proper defendants because they had no participation in the underlying events of the case.
According to Brnovich’s motion, Torralba was warned several times “that bringing claims without a good faith basis to do so is professional misconduct, and that we reserved the right to move for sanctions if Plaintiffs did not voluntarily dismiss the patently baseless claims against Attorney General Brnovich.”
Even if the wrongful death case goes to trial next year, one challenge for Torralba will be getting jurors to see past Estrada-Buelna history of violence, which also includes convictions for a 2010 domestic disturbance and a 2012 felony aggravated assault incident in Santa Cruz County, and a 2014 criminal conviction out of Navajo County.
Estrada-Buelna was released from prison in June 2018, only to be returned in January 2019 due to a probation violation. While in prison in 2019, the Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office filed felony charges against Estrada-Buelna for allegedly impeding Aguirre breathing during an assault while he was out of custody.
In November 2019, Estrada-Buelna received his discharge from prison. He was awaiting trial for the assault charge when Aguirre was killed a few weeks later.
