About this Memorial

the creator

Liz Thomson

the reason

240 victims of murder

THE NAMES

Why these names?

The video

A journey of remembrance

Sergeant Liz Thomson was assigned to the Albuquerque Police Department’s Homicide Unit from October 19, 2012 until her retirement in December of 2017. The unit was responsible for the the investigation of homicides, suspicious deaths, suspicious suicides, non-fatal violent crimes, and officer involved shootings. Liz joined the Albuquerque Police Department in 1999. Her career included patrol, crisis intervention team, crisis negotiation team, crisis outreach & support team, and supervising patrol officers and detectives.

Every victim is someone’s loved one. I always believed every death was a loss and every person deserved justice. This guiding principle resulted in many solved murder cases and most arrests led to convictions. Sadly, too many murders remain unsolved. Too many times families shared that it felt like no one cared and it seemed the death of their loved one was somehow less important than the others.

Upon retirement I decided to make this memorial, walking along the historic El Camino de Santiago in Spain. Marking the miles by reading the names, one by one, of the people who were murdered in Albuquerque during my watch. My first homicide “call-out” was October 19, 2012. By the time I retired in December of 2017 240 people had been murdered in Albuquerque.

During my time in the Homicide Unit, I maintained handwritten logs of all the cases investigated. There was something about writing the names of the murdered victims. Knowing they would no longer write their names and now I would, broke my heart. I kept the logs, intending to someday pay tribute to these people. The names I read in the memorial are those whose deaths were believed at the time to be a result of murder as defined by law. The logs also included the names from investigations of suspicious deaths, suspicious suicides, non-fatal violent crimes, and officer involved shootings. I carried all the names in my backpack, voicing the names of the murder victims, but we all made the journey together.

Each a moment in time. It was important to me to be able to give each person a memorial, unique, but also equal to the others. To accomplish this we set a timer so I could voice the names over the entire journey. When the timer went off, I would begin to record and read the next name on the list. The video is what we saw and heard at that moment, looking forward as we walked.