‘Everybody Knows Him’

Published January 27th, 2024 at 10:53 am, Last Updated February 9th, 2024 at 1:48 pm

No, longtime Corrales police officer Walter Heaton is not retiring. 

“Everybody keeps asking me about that,” said Heaton, who has been with the Village for nearly 38 years. “I was wondering if maybe they were trying to tell me that that’s what they wanted me to do.”

The Village is quite happy with Officer Heaton, thank you. That award they gave him at a Village Council meeting last month wasn’t a parting gift. It was just a way for them to remind him that they appreciate his service.

Councilor Mel Knight said you can alway count on seeing Officer Heaton during Village events.

“I think everyone in the Village feels a little safer when you’re on duty,” she said during an employee recognition ceremony that was attended by his daughter and son. 

Councilor Zach Burkett, who has three school-aged children, said he’s always glad to see Heaton on traffic duty in front of Corrales Elementary because it would take 10 minutes longer without him. “I appreciate what you do every day,” he said.

Councilor Stuart Murray noted that Officer Heaton had been in charge of the DARE program for many years. “The kids really responded to him,” he said.

In fact, working with the school is part of what has kept him in Corrales for so long. “I could have been a sergeant or a lieutenant, but I always turned it down,” he said after receiving the award. “The kids made me feel great.”

Heaton thanked the Village for recognizing him. He noted that he’s outlasted 89 other officers that have passed through Corrales and was working on his sixth police chief.

“The Village has been good to me, and I’ve been good to them,” he said, wrapping up his remarks. “I’m just glad that you appreciate me so much. And I will do my best to help this Village.”

Quite a career…

Officer Heaton has now lived in the Village more than half of his 69 years.

“My favorite joke is, I’m so old I live in a museum,” said Heaton, who lives in the Gutierrez/Minge House Museum at Casa San Ysidro, across the street from the old San Ysidro Church. He moved in as a much younger man, of course. They needed someone to handle security for the museum and old San Ysidro Church at the time he was hired. 

And while Heaton has spent 38 years in Corrales, he’d already spent about a dozen years as a tribal policeman with Acomoa and Luguna pueblos. 

In an interview with the Comment, Heaton said some of his early years were spent in New Mexico but much of his childhood was spent in California. 

“When I came back to New Mexico, to Acoma, my dad had a job cooking at a little restaurant, which is now a casino,” he said. 

Heaton had to find a job himself, and applied to be a police dispatcher. 

“They told me they didn’t need any dispatchers but they needed police officers, so I started working the graveyard shift,” he said. “I was on a government contract and the contract ran out, so I didn’t have a job anymore.”

But he was later hired by Laguna tribal police and spent nine years there. That’s also where he met his wife Donna and they started a family, producing a daughter Kimberly and son Jeremy.

The couple later divorced but the children stayed to graduate from Cibola High School.

Heaton said Jeremy takes care of the family homestead in Laguna. Kimberly lives in the Albuquerque area, as does his brother George, and he still has cousins in Acoma.

Heaton quit police work for a short time and went to work as a carpenter. “But I wanted to get back into police work, so I applied at APD.

Heaton didn’t get the job. But someone at Albuquerque police did passed his name along to Corrales Police Chief Bengie Torres. He was recruited and started working for CPD on May 3, 1986. “And I’ve been here ever since,” he said.

Police Chief Victor Mangiacapra recalled his own first day on the job at CPD in 2000. Lt. Mike Dwyer got him squared away with paperwork, then had him tag along with veteran officer Heaton.

They had school traffic duty, “so Walt parked in the sun with me,” Mangiacapra said. It was a hot day so he reached to turn on the air conditioning. But Walt swatted his hand away and told him, “‘We don’t use air conditioning.’ So I was like, what have I gotten myself into?” Mangiacapra said.

The chief said he grew to appreciate Heaton’s policing over the years. “I do have to remind him once in a while that we don’t swat rookies,” he joked. 

Mangiacapra praised Heaton for his commitment to the community. At any big event in the Village, “Walt will be there. Everybody knows him.”

… and it’s not over yet!

People also remember Officer Heaton for his trusty sidekick. Cheyanne, a chihuahua who passed away at age 15 a couple of years ago. He keeps her photo as background on his cellphone.

“She wasn’t a police dog, she was a mascot,” he said. 

Cheyanne was a gift from his daughter and he and the dog were almost inseparable. “I didn’t want to leave her alone in the house when I was at work, so she started riding with me,” Heaton said. 

So he built a car seat for the dog. She would also sometimes accompany him to DARE activities.

“She always got more attention than I did,” he said.

Heaton said the Village has grown about three times as large in the time he’s been here. Where there used to be dirt, there are expensive houses. He remembers when most of Loma Larga was just a dirt road.

Crime hasn’t changed much, there’s just a little more of it. 

“In the past, there were hardly any calls. Rio Rancho was just developing, so we didn’t have the traffic volume that we have now,” he said.

Asked if there have been any calls for service that stood out, Heaton didn’t single anything out. There haven’t been many shootings, “at least for a while,” he said in an interview prior to last week’s homicide. There were some domestic violence calls that stood out and a horse butchering that was pretty grusome. His adreniline also shot up during a few high speed chases through the Village, usually a suspect fleeing a crime committed elsewhere.

But most days, and nights, in the Village are relatively routine.

For anyone wondering, Officer Heaton has no plans for retirement.

“Not right now. I like being a police officer,” said Heaton, who has no aspirations to wind down his career by settling into a desk job. “I don’t want to be in administration. I’m not quite cut out for that.”

What he cut out for is policing the Village of Corrales. And everyone feels safer when he’s on duty.