When Donna Richmond called the Doña Ana County District Attorney's Office in 1999 to get information about the possible parole of the man who had killed her police officer father in the line of duty several years before, she expected to get the government runaround.

Instead, a return phone call came quickly, with the district attorney herself on the line.

"She (Susana Martinez) called me back and gave me the information that I needed. To be treated with that type of dignity and respect, as the victim of a crime ... that was comforting," said Richmond, now a victim advocate in Doña Ana County.

That type of personal attention to victims, to small details, is something those who know Martinez say illustrates not only her advocacy for those who have been harmed, but the serious nature with which she approaches tasks.

Supporters say Martinez, the 51-year-old Republican gubernatorial nominee and Doña Ana County district attorney, has a collaborative yet fiercely competitive spirit that can take her to the governor's mansion and beyond.

Her experience running the Las Cruces-based District Attorney's Office, as well as taking on sex offenders, murderers and drug cartels, is something that has prepared her to lead the state, backers say.

But can a relative political newcomer who once switched parties take the helm of a state with a budget, work force and problems many times larger than what she's dealt with so far?

Several recent polls have shown her with a leg up on opponent Lt. Gov. Diane Denish. The most recent poll for the Albuquerque Journal showed Martinez with 47 percent to Denish's 41 percent, with 12 percent undecided.

While Democrats work to suggest Martinez is unfit, Martinez is on a path to prove that she is ready — and getting national attention along the way.

Growing up in El Paso

Martinez is the youngest of three children, after brother Jake and sister Leticia.

Her knowledge about law enforcement came early on, from her father Jake, who spent 13 years as a sheriff's deputy. Her sense of organization and business acumen came from her mother, Paula, who worked at jobs including bookkeeping.

Both were Democrats. And both gave her a sense of risk-taking. When she was in high school, her parents decided to start a successful security guard company.

Among the ranks was young Susana, who trained to carry a firearm shortly before turning 18 and patrolled the parking lots of places where bingo games were held, making sure people — and the cash — were safe.

A special treat for Susana and Leticia came on their mother's payday, when the sisters would each get a pint of ice cream of their choosing.

Until the sixth grade, Martinez attended Our Lady of the Valley Catholic School, then a public middle and high school.

She switched because the public school was very close to home and because all her friends went there, she said in a recent interview.

It was in high school that two teachers gathered a group of girls to talk about life goals. Martinez — known as Susie, Susan and Sue to friends and family — started thinking about public service, perhaps about becoming mayor. But she wasn't sure how. Becoming a lawyer first was the path, she decided.

"What these teachers were teaching us at the end of the day was set your goals throughout your life in a way you don't ever just stop achieving or stop moving forward," she said. "And so that's where I decided definitely I wanted to be a lawyer and definitely wanted to be in public service."

That penchant for public service soon blossomed. Martinez became so interested in politics that nonpolitical pals would sometimes have to pull her away, recalled longtime friend Bonnie Bueno.

Martinez and Bueno's brother Armando would spend hours talking about politics in high school. "I'd walk away and do something else and come back and they were still debating ... and I'd be like, 'let's do something different,' " Bueno recalled.

Martinez was student body president at Riverside High in El Paso. But she had her sights set higher. "My brother would say, 'I'm going to be the president,' and she would say, 'I'm going to be the first female president,' " Bueno said.

Martinez graduated in the top 10 in her class from Riverside, and by 1981 was graduating from the University of Texas-El Paso with a bachelor's degree in criminal justice.

Then came law school at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. One of her professors, Ted Roberts, said he remembers Martinez as one of the hardest-working students. In her second year at law school, she was selected for one of the trial teams he coached. "There are very few second-year students who make it," he said. "She really showed her willingness to work hard."

Norman was different from El Paso. Another professor there pronounced her last name Mar-TIN-az. For about two weeks, she didn't realize who he was talking to, she recalled. "I had never heard it said that way."

To highlight Hispanic awareness month, Martinez wanted former San Antonio, Texas, mayor Henry Cisneros to speak to her law school. The law professors said no. She then sought a grant for him to speak to the university as a whole, and prevailed.

When asked why she sought him out, Martinez said, "He was Hispanic, he was very successful at the time in changing and turning San Antonio around in a very positive way economically and otherwise, and I thought he was a great role model." (That was before he ran into political trouble, she pointed out.)

After graduating in the spring of 1986, Martinez moved to Las Cruces, which she described as "close enough to home." After passing the bar, she landed a job as an assistant district attorney in the 3rd Judicial District.

Her first cases involved sexual abuse and rape — something that would become a recurring focus during her career. Realizing school hadn't prepared her to deal with the myriad issues surrounding those types of cases, she advocated for more training. And she found the job rewarding.

"When you have a homicide of a child, usually, not always, you have no one who is actually there in the courtroom for the child ... so you end up as a prosecutor sort of being a voice for that child."

As she carved out a reputation as a solid prosecutor, her career was headed up. It was sidetracked, however, when she was fired by then-district attorney Greg Valdez shortly after his election in 1992. Martinez said she was fired the day she was subpoenaed to a hearing for an investigator whom Valdez had fired. She asked if her dismissal was related to the subpoena. She said Valdez wouldn't tell her either way.

Valdez in a recent interview confirmed that he didn't give her a reason at the time. But he said he let her go for two reasons. On one case she handled, she had missed some key timelines, Valdez said. On another, she brought a case into the office on which her husband, Chuck Franco, was working. During his career, Franco has worked for the Las Cruces Police Department, the city's Weed and Seed program and the New Mexico State University Police Department. He is now the Doña Ana County undersheriff.

"I had given her a blanket directive to not take any case into the office on which her husband was an investigator," Valdez said. "It seemed she was just doing things to undermine me."

Martinez called that "completely untrue" and said her personnel file is void of his above statement and that there's a deposition to the contrary. Martinez eventually sued, and the case was settled for about $120,000, she said.

After leaving the District Attorney's Office, Martinez went to work as a special prosecutor, then later at the state's Children, Youth and Families Department.

In 1991, she married Franco, someone she met on the job. She had previously been married to a fellow University of Oklahoma graduate, a marriage that lasted three years.

In 1995, ahead of the 1996 election in which she would defeat Valdez, Martinez switched her party affiliation from Democrat to Republican.

A month or two before, two members of the local Republican Party invited Martinez and her husband to lunch. Martinez had an inkling that the pair wanted to speak to them about changing parties, so she warned her husband, also a Democrat at the time.

She told him, "I think I know what this is about. Let's just talk to them, let's just be very nice and polite and we'll just leave and thank them for lunch."

That lunch took a couple of hours. "We simply talked about the issues. ... We talked about what role government should have in our lives, the Second Amendment and the individual's right to carry firearms. We talked about welfare as being a way of life versus being a hand up. We just went down the whole list of things."

The lunch ended. "We left and sat in the car, my husband and I, and said, 'I'll be, we're Republicans and now what are we going to do in a county where we are outnumbered so drastically?' — knowing I wanted to run for DA."

For a month, the pair talked it over. "We decided to change parties, knowing that could be the beginning of the end, but we did it anyway," Martinez said.

After the switch, some party insiders say, she quickly worked to make a name for herself, always making sure to appear with Republican dignitaries who came to town.

In 1996, Martinez was elected district attorney for the first time with almost 60 percent of the vote.

On the job

Martinez's most high-profile cases over the years have involved some of the worst child- and sex-abuse cases New Mexico has seen, including that of an infant, Brianna Lopez, who died in 2002 after being sexually assaulted and from injuries including skull fractures and broken ribs. Several family members were convicted in the case.

That those types of cases are her forte is no surprise to those who know her, including those who happened across her only because of circumstance.

Darla Wax, whose daughter Ashley was murdered in Las Cruces in 2005, said, "She just became family, almost instantly. She held our hands through the entire process."

Martinez prosecuted that case, and also that of other young women who were murdered, including that of Katie Sepich, a New Mexico State University student who was raped and killed in 2003, her partially burned body left at a city dump.

Bueno, her childhood friend, said Martinez since high school has had a passion to right wrongs. "She couldn't stand the scumbags ... she just didn't like the fact when she heard of kids of being molested ... it sickened her. She'd get really, really upset."

Martinez seemingly took that anger and channeled it into her work at the District Attorney's Office, where she now oversees 70 employees and a budget of $5.6 million.

As district attorney, Martinez has had her share of big wins, including in the case of Carly Martinez, a New Mexico State student who in 1998 was kidnapped, raped and killed. The first trial in that case ended with a hung jury, something Martinez found hard to swallow. Two men later were convicted and sentenced to prison in the case.

Between the first two trials, she told the Albuquerque Tribune that she approached that case as she would have any other, although the pressure was on. "I have no doubt that it's going to be perceived as the case that if I lose, there's no hope for re-election," she told the paper. Martinez won re-election the next year and most recently was re-elected for a fourth term in 2008.

Lawyer Gary Mitchell worked for the defense in that case. He recently recalled that Martinez was tough — but no more tough than other good prosecutors in the state.

Mitchell, a Democrat who has known Martinez for many years, said he long has figured she had her sights on some other office. "I've always thought she had high expectations and great aspirations," he said. "Just knowing Susana you could just tell. There are certain people who are happy with where they are and don't want to go any further, and I always felt she wanted to obtain higher office."

Martinez, whose campaign created an ad that features Carly Martinez's family thanking her for her work, has said she's never done a case for political reasons.

And while Martinez said that she's been "fortunate to have a guilty verdict in every child homicide in our office," not all cases turned out as well. A case involving guards accused of rape at the Doña Ana County Detention Center ended without any of the accused serving significant jail time. Martinez agreed the time served was "insignificant" but said sentencing is up to the judge, not her office.

Some of the charges in the case were dismissed after the judge said the government was "100 percent culpable for failing to disclose material evidence available to defense." Martinez said the government's hands were tied in the case, and her office didn't have access to the information, which she said was held by a private attorney involved in the case.

Rising star

Martinez said she only started thinking seriously about running in the summer of 2009, although it had crossed her mind. But by the mid-2000s, word was getting around that Martinez might want to run for something beyond district attorney.

In 2007, she and Harvey Yates, a member of a longtime oil family, met at a Las Cruces event where he was to meet GOP candidates for the state House, although Martinez was not among the would-be representatives.

Yates, now the chairman of the state Republican Party, remembers thinking at the time how bright she was. "Some folks in Doña Ana County wanted me to meet this shining star," he said.

The two talked hypothetically about her running for attorney general, a position in which Martinez told Yates she was not interested.

Fast-forward to mid-2009, when Yates received an e-mail from Martinez saying she was planning to run for governor. "My thought was that she's very bright. ... but she had a tremendously difficult road in front of her because she had no money."

Although that may have been the case early in the campaign, Martinez, since winning the Republican nomination in a feisty primary, has had no trouble getting donors to invest in her.

Campaign focused on immigration, crime

If there were no barriers between Martinez's El Paso high school and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, it would take just minutes to walk into that neighboring country from Riverside High's front door.

But those barriers, including a highway and the U.S.-Mexico border, haven't stopped the topic of immigration from blazing a path into Martinez's campaign.

Her childhood proximity to Mexico and her time as district attorney dealing with immigration-related issues have given her a theme to tap into as she campaigns for higher office. Martinez talks about her opposition to issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and prosecuting dangerous drug cartels as much as she speaks about education and the economy.

"We face those challenges every day," said Martinez, whose great-grandparents on both sides were from Mexico and who speaks Spanish.

"We prosecute an awful lot of individuals who come to our country who their only intent is to commit criminal acts," she said. "My focus has always been on the illegal immigrants who come here with the purpose of committing criminal acts."

Martinez's campaign also has made corruption in state government a theme, with pledges to change business as usual in Santa Fe.

While Martinez seems proven as a prosecutor, her political personality is something different, observers say. Her campaign has been highly managed by handlers, who apparently have told her to leave the room quickly after most media appearances and who strictly control answers to newspaper questionnaires.

Her TV ads have been tough, swiping back at Denish when attacked and making some attacks of her own.

Being more of a political novice than Denish has meant Martinez has relied heavily on consultants' campaign advice. Some of that political support comes from out of state — as have large amounts of her campaign cash.

Water rights activists in the northern part of New Mexico have accused Martinez of being beholden to Texas interests that want New Mexico's water, labeling her "Susana La Tejana." They point to financial backing from oil and gas producers, which reports show have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to support her candidacy.

Martinez's candidacy hasn't gone unnoticed outside New Mexico. Democrats have made light of national figures who have supported her campaign and visited the state for her, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Apart from assailing who she associates with, critics have scrutinized several contracts with her office and her spending on salary increases.

A former deputy to Martinez made more than $60,000 selling office supplies to Martinez's office, the Albuquerque Journal reported. Records obtained by The New Mexican show the company of Janetta Hicks, now district attorney in Chaves, Lea and Eddy counties, provided the District Attorney's Office equipment including digital voice recorders and holsters, and self-protection supplies including body shields.

Martinez said in an interview that, looking back, she might have handled that situation differently. "Instead of just analytically studying the issue and seeing that I didn't do anything illegal or anything wrong — but the second part of that analysis needs to include (asking) how would that look? And so, certainly, after doing it now, looking back (it) would be something I wouldn't have done."

Following through

Darla Wax says she always appreciated how Martinez treated her son Trevor, who was 7 at the time of her daughter's murder. During a court hearing, "Susana bent down to my son's level ... it was just the way she talked to him and reassured him that things would be OK. She didn't have to do that, but she did."

Five years after the death, long after the court case ended, Wax still hears from Martinez. When Trevor in 2009 won a Character Counts award at school, Martinez attended the ceremony to congratulate him. "I don't think we were singled out," Wax said. "It's just the kind of person she is."

Martinez said her mother taught her the virtue of patience, in part by showing her how to juggle a full-time job, a special-needs daughter, her children's activities and working after hours as the family's fledgling company was growing.

"Extreme patience," is how she described what her mother had.

With weeks left until the Nov. 2 election, Martinez must do some juggling of her own.

Contact Kate Nash at 986-3036 or knash@sfnewmexican.com. Read her blog at www.greenchilechatter.com.