New murder charge revives Valencia County mother’s fight for justice
A new murder charge against a Los Chavez woman has reopened Victoria Woolley’s grief over her 16-year-old son, killed in a 2014 Belen drunk-driving crash.
A Valencia County mother who buried her teenage son after a drunk-driving crash says the latest murder case against the same woman has pulled an old tragedy back to the surface. For Victoria Woolley of Los Chavez, the arrest of Djohni Orndorff has turned a new death investigation into a painful reminder of how one defendant has already left one local family shattered.
Valencia County deputies found Gerald Marquez Jr. dead near Square Deal Road and Cielo Vista Road shortly before 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 9. Investigators believed he had been intentionally struck by a vehicle. Court records and reporting say Orndorff, 45, was accused of killing her boyfriend with a beige 1998 Ford E350 Sprite RV and was being held in the Socorro County Detention Center on a $25,000 cash-only bond.
The case has struck a raw nerve in Los Chavez because Woolley’s son, Tanner Woolley, was killed in Belen in 2014. He was 16 and riding his motorcycle when he was hit by Dejohni Orndorff-Madrid. Police said she was drunk. KRQE later reported that the case ended with a guilty plea to aggravated DWI and careless driving, not a vehicular homicide conviction, and Woolley described the defendant as a repeat offender.
That earlier outcome is part of what makes the new charge so explosive in Valencia County. Under New Mexico law, homicide by vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor or drugs is treated as a second-degree felony, a charge that carries serious consequences because it links deadly crashes to impairment and repeat risk on the road. In this case, deputies say the violence was not a collision but an intentional act, raising the stakes even higher for prosecutors and for the family left behind.
Woolley and Sophia Marquez, Gerald Marquez Jr.’s mother, have been drawn together by the same kind of loss, one from 2014 and one from this month. Both women have expressed anger at a justice system they fear did not stop Orndorff before another family was damaged, and Woolley has said the new arrest forced her to relive the pain of losing Tanner while renewing her determination to speak out. In Valencia County, the case now stands as both a murder investigation and a test of whether repeated warnings, prior convictions and past courtroom outcomes were enough to prevent another death.
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