SANTA FE, NM — A New Mexico child welfare agency is refusing to release records tied to a dead child case, saying state law allows the files only for “bona fide research” and not for journalists. The dispute centers on a request for documents involving an 8-month-old boy found dead in his parents’ North Valley home late last month.
Weeks after the boy’s death, key facts about the case remain limited. Albuquerque police have said drugs were found throughout the home, but the child’s cause of death has not been immediately determined. The refusal to release records has now become part of a broader fight over transparency in child welfare cases, with lawmakers and open-government advocates arguing the law gives the department too much control over what the public can see.
How the records request was denied
The New Mexican asked the Children, Youth and Families Department for records that state law says should be released when a child dies while involved with the system. Records custodian Kathleen Hardy denied the request, calling the documents confidential under state law.
Hardy then referred the matter to the agency’s general counsel, Amanda Romero. Romero said the exemption is limited to people conducting bona fide research or investigations whose results would help the department improve policy and practice. Reporters do not qualify, she said.
CYFD spokesperson Jake Thompson said the department decides who fits that category. He said the agency believed it had followed both the letter and spirit of the law in denying the request.
What police have said about the North Valley death
According to Albuquerque police, the 8-month-old boy was reportedly exposed to drugs at birth and was found dead in his parents’ North Valley home. His parents, Mark Armijo and Shawna Sitz, were arrested for violating conditions of their probation after drugs were found in the home, police spokesperson Gilbert Gallegos said in an Aug. 31 email.
Gallegos also said toxicology results would take time and that police could not release investigation records at that stage. KRQE 13 reported that the child had drugs in his system when he was born but was allowed to go home with his mother because she tested positive for drugs she had prescriptions for.
The station also reported that state officials visited the home repeatedly and found it clean and stocked with food. Those details have not changed the larger question now facing CYFD: whether fatality records should be available to the public or kept behind an internal review standard.
Researchers also ran into the same barrier
The records fight has not affected journalists alone. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said her team made a similar request as part of a national project called Lives Cut Short, which tracks information about children who die from abuse or neglect.
Her team was denied as well. An August 2025 email from Hardy showed CYFD rejected that request for reasons similar to the ones used against The New Mexican. Putnam-Hornstein said research requests often involve formal agreements, ethics review, and strict protections for sensitive data such as Social Security numbers and birth dates.
She said New Mexico appears to be treating “bona fide research” as a category the agency itself can define, which she called arbitrary. Putnam-Hornstein argued that the Lives Cut Short project is public policy research even though it does not go through the human-subject research process used in some academic settings.
Lawmakers say the 2025 fix created a loophole
State lawmakers revisited confidentiality rules in 2025 as part of Senate Bill 42, a broader child welfare package. The bill originally included language that would have made information about deaths in abuse and neglect cases available to journalists and the public.
That language changed late in the session. The final version allowed unredacted records only for researchers whose work could prove useful to the department, a structure Sen. Katy Duhigg said she did not intend when she sponsored the legislation. Duhigg, an Albuquerque Democrat, said the department should not be able to decide whether a reporter’s work counts as useful to the agency.
She said she plans to close what she called a loophole, arguing that the whole point was to increase transparency around fatalities and near-fatalities involving children in state custody.
Open-government advocates warn of too much secrecy
Amanda Lavin, legal director for the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said CYFD is likely acting within the law as written, even if the result is poor public accountability. She said the agency has a broader pattern of secrecy and that it is difficult for the public to know how child welfare investigations are conducted.
Thompson said CYFD is prepared to work with lawmakers on refining state law and policy to improve services for vulnerable children. But advocates say the current setup leaves too much discretion in the hands of the agency that holds the records.
Putnam-Hornstein said some states are far more open. She pointed to California records that can include coroner’s reports and other child welfare documents, and Arizona’s practice of releasing summaries of child deaths, including names and ages. She said New Mexico is not being particularly transparent.
The broader push for fatality transparency in New Mexico
The debate now extends beyond one case. Supporters of broader disclosure say the public has a right to know what happens when a child dies while involved with state child welfare systems, especially if the state may have had prior contact with the family.
Critics of the current law say withholding records makes it harder to identify failures and fix them. Duhigg said privacy matters, but not at the cost of preventing the state from learning from deaths and near-deaths that may signal bigger problems in child protection.
CYFD, for its part, says it has an “inviolate commitment” to transparency and to protecting privacy. For now, though, the agency’s reading of the statute means the records tied to this child’s death remain out of reach for reporters and, in this case, even for outside researchers.
Bona fide research still means agency approval
CYFD says researchers can sometimes receive records if they show how their work will help the department develop policy and practice. But even there, the agency decides whether the request qualifies.
That standard is at the center of the current dispute. Critics argue that a public agency should not be able to define usefulness in a way that keeps fatality records hidden whenever the request comes from a reporter or a researcher the department does not prefer.
For now, the denial stands, and the state’s child death records law is back in the spotlight as lawmakers weigh whether to rewrite it again.
