A second candidate for La Plata County coroner, a relative newcomer to Durango but with years of experience in law enforcement and forensic investigation, has stepped forward.
“I think I have the disposition and compassion for the job,” Beverly Begay told The Durango Herald’s editorial board Monday.
Begay, 51, joins incumbent coroner Jann Smith on the November ballot. Smith, appointed by county commissioners in November 2012 to fill the remainder of Dr. Carol Huser’s term, announced her candidacy in January.
Begay will run as an unaffiliated candidate.
As a member of the Navajo Nation, she was born in Ft. Defiance, Ariz., and spent her formative years in the Mojave Desert in the triangle formed by Barstow and Needles, Calif., as well as Las Vegas. Summers were spent in Navajo country between Gallup and Window Rock, N.M.
She graduated high school in Gallup in 1980 and spent 3½ years at Eastern New Mexico University as a criminal justice and political science major before leaving for law-enforcement experience.
While still studying, she worked in communications for the New Mexico State Police, the Portales, N.M., police and the campus police at her campus.
After leaving school, Begay was employed at the Navajo Nation’s attorney general’s office and the McKinley County District Attorney’s Office in Gallup. At the latter agency where she spent 12 years, she was an investigator and special projects director.
During much of the same period, she worked for the Office of the Medical Examiner in Albuquerque, with five years as senior deputy medical investigator. From 1999 to 2012, she was in the investigations division of the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science in Houston.
She worked some high-profile cases while in Houston that were profiled on the CBS television show “48 Hours,” she said.
Begay and her husband, Darrell Robertson, came to Durango in July 2012. She has worked as an administrative assistant in the La Plata County District Attorney’s Office since then.
Robertson, who spent 26 years with the Houston police, joined the Durango Police Department where he was promoted to lieutenant Monday.
Begay said the most challenging aspects of her career has been forging her way in male-dominated fields and coming to grips with the Navajo taboo of not involving oneself in any aspect of death.
“I think my love of forensics resolved the issue for me,” she said in reference to her resolve to pursue forensics in the face of the Navajo taboo.
She is a certified instructor with the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, a registered medico-legal death investigator and a former member of Homicide Investigators of Texas.
She also has taken basic police officer training, and, online, studied incident management with the Federal Emergency Management Institute and criminal justice administration at the University of Phoenix.
She became interested in the coroner’s job when she met Huser and learned she was retiring, Begay said. But at the time, she hadn’t lived in the county long enough to qualify for the position.
daler@durangoherald.com
