The family of the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Facility inmate who died of an apparent suicide plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the county, according to Richard Martinez, a paralegal at The Rothstein Law Firm.

Harris Silver remembers seeing his life flash before his eyes the day he almost died along an Arizona highway in 1986.

It’s been more than three years since Marino “Reno” Leyba shot and killed his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Sarah Lovato—but this week, the New Mexico Supreme Court sent the case back to the district court for a new trial.

“It’s not safe. There’s no safety. You can’t trust anybody. You got to protect yourself,” Rebekah Apachito says. As one of about 1,600 tribal members who live in the Navajo community of To’hajiilee, 90 miles west of Santa Fe, she has good reason to be afraid: According to federal crime data, Native American women are 10 times more likely than the average American to be murdered. Even more shockingly, approximately one in three Native American women will be raped in her lifetime.

Former Gov. Bill Richardson could be the Obama administration’s commerce secretary. But he’s not, because of his involvement in a alleged pay-for-play scheme with a Beverly Hills, Calif. brokerage firm called CDR Financial Products, Inc. In December, executives of that firm pleaded guilty to conspiring with the nation’s biggest banks to rig bids on financial products of municipal bonds.

Michael McGarrity is a former deputy sheriff for Santa Fe County. For the release of his 13th novel, titled Hard Country: A Novel of the Old West, he asked Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA Operations Officer and author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House to interview him at Collected Works Bookstore.

As I once had to explain to a semi-hysterical caller to SFR, we regularly report on political corruption, burglary, homicide, rape and more. Just because we run a story about something doesn’t mean we condone it. Apropos, burglary, homicide, rape, etc. collectively form the subject of this week’s Big Picture: crime.