Since 1984, members of the Potter’s House had gathered on Washington Avenue in Santa Fe every year to preach to the crowds streaming away from the burning of Zozobra, the giant marionette whose destruction opens the city’s annual Fiesta. For fifteen years the relationship with police was, by the church’s own account, a good one. In September 1999, it broke down badly enough that a twelve-year-old boy with asthma ended up in an emergency room, a blind man was maced, and a visiting pastor was in handcuffs, all in what became known locally as the Zozobra pepper spray incident. The New Mexican’s report on the fallout, credited to Steve Terrell with Mark Hummels contributing, is a rare document in this archive: a genuinely two-sided dispute where the church has a real grievance and the city has a real safety concern, sitting in the same article without either side proven wrong.
A tradition since 1984, and a confrontation in 1999
The Zozobra crowd runs to twenty-five or thirty thousand people pouring down a single street, and Potter’s House members had preached to that crowd for a decade and a half, sometimes with bullhorns and handing out pamphlets. Several members described the burning itself as a religious ceremony with dancing devils. Congregants said police relations had historically been good, with one Española pastor recalling officers who had effectively served as the group’s protection in years past. Church youth director John Byers, who works for the state probation and parole office, said this year’s officers seemed different, newer and considerably more aggressive than those the church had dealt with before.
Who got hurt
Three specific injuries anchor the church’s account. Chrystopher Crespin, twelve years old and asthmatic, said an officer lifted him off the ground, threw him against a parked car, and sprayed pepper spray in his face while he was leaving the scene to look for his sister; he was taken to St. Vincent Hospital afterward. Donald Huerta, a forty-nine-year-old blind man, was also maced. Two guards from the county juvenile jail, Carlos Rivera and John Allbritton, said an officer sprayed them after Rivera offered the officer a blessing, telling him Jesus loved him. These are the church’s own account of the confrontation, presented at a press conference along with video and photographs, including one showing an officer using the spray.
Two accounts of the same street
City spokesman Juan Ríos did not dispute that pepper spray was used. He disputed that it was used improperly, describing a crowd of tens of thousands funneling down a street the church group was blocking, and calling the situation a serious public-safety hazard once officers asked the group to clear the roadway and were refused. Ríos said the assembly became illegal at the point the group moved into the street itself, and confirmed that in prior years the church had not needed a permit for the same activity, a detail that cuts in the church’s favor even as the city maintained this year’s conduct crossed a line. Byers offered a different count of who was actually present when the spray came out: the church claimed as many as 450 members had been at the scene earlier, but only about 60 remained by the time officers deployed it, a detail that, if accurate, narrows considerably the crowd the safety justification was actually protecting against.
The one arrest
Police made a single arrest that night. Les Uptain, a Potter’s House pastor visiting from San Antonio for a conference, was charged with two counts of battery on a peace officer, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and failing to obey a lawful order, the battery counts naming Police Chief John Denko and Officer Martin Bird specifically. Uptain denied touching anyone and said he believed he was arrested for standing up and objecting aloud to what he called a police state taking people’s rights away. Ríos, for his part, said he was not certain exactly what conduct had justified the charges against Uptain. Denko declined to comment, citing the litigation the church and at least one individual had by then threatened. These charges reflect an arrest and formal accusation, not a verdict, and nothing in the record reviewed here indicates how the case concluded.
The city’s answer about the boy: the Zozobra pepper spray deflection
Asked directly about a twelve-year-old with asthma being pepper-sprayed while looking for his sister, Ríos’s response deflected responsibility rather than addressing the force used: “It’s unfortunate the parents had children with them at this demonstration.” Whatever the underlying safety case for clearing the street, that particular answer treats a maced child as a parenting failure rather than a use-of-force question. It is worth reading exactly as Ríos gave it, rather than smoothed over.
Why this confrontation still matters
This is not a simple story, and it should not be flattened into one. The city’s safety concern about a street full of tens of thousands of people is legitimate on its face, and a group of even sixty demonstrators blocking that street is a real hazard regardless of their message. At the same time, an asthmatic child thrown against a car and maced while separated from his sister, and a blind man sprayed in the confusion, are facts the city’s own spokesman did not dispute, only recontextualized. Both things can be true at once: the street needed to be cleared, and the response to a twelve-year-old was disproportionate. This is also, notably, one confrontation in this archive where the church was not the aggressor in the physical sense, unlike the parade stunts documented in Seattle or Arizona. The pattern here is confrontational public evangelism meeting an escalating and, by multiple independent accounts, unusually aggressive police response, with real injuries on both a bystander child and a jailer offering nothing more provocative than a blessing.
Sources and further reading
- Steve Terrell, “Fallout over post-Zozobra confrontation,” The New Mexican, September 11, 1999 (Mark Hummels contributing); archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On confrontational public evangelism elsewhere in this archive, see Mill Avenue and the Ostrich Festival Parade
