Guard turns jail into MMA octagon

SANTA FE (KRQE) - A former Santa Fe County jail guard turned the detention center into his own private mixed martial-arts octagon before he was fired last summer, according to documents and two former inmates.

The former guard, Anthony Hurtado, allegedly challenged two inmates to fight him in an area of the jail without cameras.

“It is a horrible, horrible abuse of power,” said Tom Clark, a Santa Fe attorney representing one of the inmates.

Hurtado was hired at the jail about a year ago, according to county personnel documents and it didn’t take long for him to make a name for himself among the inmates.

“He liked to let people know he was strong,” said Lucas Culin, a former inmate at the jail. “He would even arm wrestle people.”

Culin was incarcerated at the jail earlier this year on a probation violation and got to know Hurtado.

“He had big ears,” Culin said of Hurtado. “So I would mess around with him about his big ears and kind of call him names. And he would call me names back. And it really wasn’t a big deal.”

But the good-natured ribbing took an ugly turn in early May, Culin said.

“That day, I don’t know what got into him,” he said. “He called me out in front of the while pod, and he told me – he’s all I can choke you out, he told me.”

Culin said Hurtado took him to an area of the jail called the Horseshoe, where there are no cameras and did exactly that, choked him out. After Culin tapped out and went back into the pod, Hurtado walked through again 10 minutes later. That’s when one of the inmates told the guard it hadn’t been a fair fight because Culin had been wearing shower shoes and had immediately slipped and fallen when the fight began.

“And I said, ‘Oh no, we’re gonna do this again,’ ” Culin said. “Sure enough, they said, ‘Here’s some shoes.’ So I put on some shoes and went out again into the horseshoe and he did the same thing.”

The second time was worse for Culin.

“That time he messed me up pretty bad,” he said. “I had a big cut across my forehead. I had a long cut across my arm. My thumb felt dislocated because it bruised real bad on my hand.”

Esli Dominguez – a former boxer – was one of the inmates watching through the horseshoe windows.

“(Hurtado) was just manhandling Lucas,” he said.

Dominguez said he stuck up for Culin and that’s when the guard told him it was his turn to fight and ordered the inmate to go out to the area with no cameras.

“I’m the inmate, he’s guard,” Dominguez said. “I have to listen to what he says.”

So the two began brawling.

“At first he started wrestling me,” Dominguez said. “He got me in a chokehold and tried to pass me all the way out. And when I flipped him over, he swung a couple times …”

The fight ended after about 10 minutes when Hurtado heard other guards coming, Dominguez said.

But that wasn’t the end of the fight club.

“He came in the next week, on his next shift, talking about how the whole jail was saying that I beat him,” Dominguez said.

Hurtado demanded a rematch until someone was knocked out, Dominguez said.

“We go for like 10 minutes the first time, going at each other, choking each other,” he said.

Dominguez said they took rest breaks every few minutes, like rounds in a boxing match, before again resuming the fight.

“Finally we got into it where we got so tired that we just had to end the fight,” he said. “(It lasted) a good 40 minutes.”

Both Culin and Dominguez said they had no choice but to fight.

“I felt like I had to do it,” Dominguez said. “But I felt that I had to hold back because I didn’t want to get in that much trouble if something did happen to him.”

When jail officials heard what happened, they put Hurtado on leave and later fired him.But no one from the jail or Santa Fe County would speak to KRQE News 13 about the incidents because the two former inmates have threatened legal action.

David Foster, another attorney, representing Culin and Dominguez, said Hurtado should face criminal charges.

“Why charges have not been filed against this guard for clearly criminal acts of assault and battery I don’t know,” said Foster, a former prosecutor.

The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office investigates crimes at the jail. However, Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia said neither the inmates nor jail officials told him about these incidents.

“And things like that, I would think would have, should have been reported to law enforcement to be able to investigate,” he said.

Hurtado didn’t return a phone message seeking comment.