SOCORRO, N.M. – New Mexico Tech will say farewell to one of the most long-term employees on campus this week. Dave Mathews of the Campus Police Department says farewell after 31 years of service.

All employees, students, and local residents are invited to a retirement/farewell party for Dave at 11 a.m. Friday, Aug. 17, in the SAC.

“Tech has been good to me,” Mathews said. “I really enjoyed working at Tech. I’ve done street enforcement and you get tired of that.”

A Socorro native, Mathews has deep connections to Tech. His grandfather Irl Scott was a biochemistry professor. His father was an NMT graduate and served one term on the Board of Regents. 

After working for the City of Socorro, Mathews first started working at NMT in the early 1980s. He has been working on campus continually since 1988 when then-Chief Tom Zimmerman asked him to return.  Mathews has worked with five different chiefs – Zimmerman, Louie Latasa, Billy Romero, George Murillo and current Chief Scott Scarsborough.

Mathews said he has made countless friends over the years – faculty, staff and students. But the three people who he admires the most on campus during his career have been former English professor Howard Sylvester, Zimmerman, and psychology professor Frank Etscorn.

Mathews has also seen the Police Department housed in at least five different buildings – Speare Hall, Workman Quonset Hut, Brown Hall, Facilities Management, and the SAC.

For most of his time at Tech, he job title was dispatcher. Nowadays, he and his colleagues are called Public Safety Telecommunicators.

Mathews said working in campus law enforcement is quite different than city patrols.

“We live here and we do everything here. Students eat, live, sleep and go to school here. And the staff is here all the time. Here, you have to process everything. You have to be mom and dad and scorekeeper all at once. Some of these students are thousands of miles away from home. You can’t just arrest a kid and have mom and dad bail them out. We have to help out on campus.”

“We are the first responders and we see it all,” he said. “From an iguana stuck in a tree that climbed out of a dorm window, to a kid needing a ride from the grocery to traffic accidents to someone in need of medical assistance. We see the full gamut.”

In his retirement, Mathews said he expects to do more traveling. He also wants to devote more time to his hobbies – model trains and gardening, among others.

– NMT –