By Gabrielle Porter
The Santa Fe New Mexican
CLOVIS, N.M. — Carbon monoxide poisoning was likely to blame in the deaths of a man, his pregnant fiancée and his young son, whose bodies were found in a car in Clovis over the weekend, officials said.
Hector Flores, 29; Alizara Gallegos, 19; and Flores’ son, Aaden Flores, were all discovered Saturday in a Chrysler in the parking lot of La Vista Inn in Clovis, where the car apparently had been running since the family pulled into the lot shortly after 1:15 a.m., according to a Clovis police report. Police noticed a liquid pouring onto the ground from the car, and found the Chrysler’s tailpipe was broken in half.
“It looked like someone had done a home repair job on the pipe,” one officer wrote in a report.
Police didn’t include Aaden’s age in the report, but a GoFundMe campaign set up to raise money for funeral expenses for the family said he was 8 years old. A relative of Flores told The Eastern New Mexico News Gallegos was five months’ pregnant, and that the family was living in Clovis at the time.
Clovis police Deputy Chief Trevor Thron told The New Mexican on Wednesday the state Office of the Medical Investigator had not finalized its investigation into the deaths, but all signs pointed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Thron said officers also did tests of their own on the Chrysler, and found that after about 20 minutes of running the engine, the gas had built up to “dangerous levels” inside the vehicle.
A man staying at the motel told police he was friends with Flores and was expecting him at the motel the night before. He told police he noticed at one point the family had arrived, but didn’t check on them until the next morning.
Carbon monoxide is produced when materials are burned, and the gas can build to unhealthy levels indoors or in enclosed spaces. While it can occur any time, officials see a spike in the winter months, when people are more likely indoors and using heat sources to try to stay warm, said Chelsea Langer , a program manager for environmental public health tracking at the New Mexico Department of Health .
There were 122 emergency room visits for unintentional carbon monoxide poisonings last winter in the state, according to Langer, including seven in Santa Fe . This season, there have been 21 since Oct. 1 .
In 2022, the most recent year in which data on fatalities was available, Langer said there were 19 deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning, including three in Santa Fe County . That same year there were also 290 calls made to poison control about poisoning.
It’s a pernicious problem, Langer said, and one state officials warned about Wednesday morning as a major winter storm moved into Northern New Mexico .
“The hardest and most dangerous thing about carbon monoxide is that you can’t see, smell or taste it, so you really have no sense of if you are being exposed or not,” Langer said. “It can bring on very sudden illness or deaths.”
At particular risk are those whose health is already vulnerable: children, pregnant women and anyone with a chronic disease or disorder, including many older adults. Others at a higher risk are people who work in certain jobs in which they might come into more frequent contact with carbon monoxide: mechanics, firefighters, forklift operators, barbecue workers or those who work in poorly ventilated kitchens.
“In homes, it’s usually like faulty furnaces, faulty heaters, fireplaces, gas stoves,” Langer said. “If you’re using a generator inside or in a garage or, like, in a camper, if you have a vehicle engine running like in a garage or a shed, [carbon monoxide] can build up.”
A car that’s running with a clogged or damaged tailpipe can also be a danger.
Along with being undetectable by the human eye, nose and tongue, carbon monoxide poisoning has tricky symptoms that are tough to distinguish from basic flu symptoms: headache, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, “generally not feeling well,” Langer said.
Having furnaces and heaters checked annually and making use of carbon monoxide detectors are key to stopping carbon monoxide poisonings and deaths, Langer said.
“They’re almost all preventable,” she said.
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