SWAT team’s shooting of Marine causes outrage
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Jose Guerena
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SWAT team’s shooting of Marine causes outrage
Associated Press; By AMANDA LEE MYERS | AP
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TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons.
An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family’s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff’s department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a “boom” and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.
A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle.
What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting “Police!” in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.
And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet.
“Hurry up, he’s bleeding,” Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. “I don’t know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance.”
When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor.
But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a drug-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a gun. The county prosecutor’s office says the shooting was justified.
But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a family’s life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A family lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff’s 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views.
The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:
“Why, why, why was he killed?”
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Outside the family’s stucco home, a giant framed photo of Guerena in his Marine uniform sat placed in the front bay window, American flags waved in the yard and signs condemning his death were taped to the garage door.
The 27-year-old Guerena had completed two tours in Iraq, and a former superior there was among those who couldn’t make sense of his death.
Leo Verdugo said Guerena stood out among other Marines for his maturity and sense of responsibility. Verdugo, who retired as a master sergeant last year after 25 years in the Marines, placed Guerena in charge of an important helicopter refueling mission in the remote west desert of Iraq.
“He had a lot of integrity and he was a man of his word,” Verdugo said.
Verdugo, who also lives in Tucson, said Guerena came to him for advice in 2006 about whether to retire from the Marines and apply to the Border Patrol.
When Verdugo ran into Guerena and his wife at a Motor Vehicle Department office about a month before Guerena was killed, Verdugo said that Guerena told him that the Border Patrol had turned him down because of problems with his vision and that he had instead taken a mining job.
Those who worked with Guerena at ASARCO’S Mission Mine said the man they knew would never be a part of drug smuggling.
“I don’t care what the cops say. I don’t believe for one moment Jose was involved in anything illegal,” said Sharon Hargrave, a co-worker, adding through tears: “They were judge, jury and executioner, and there was no excuse.”
Guerena worked as a “helper” at two crushers in the mine, shoveling piles of rocks that fall from conveyor belts and wheel-barrowing heavy debris. “No one in their right mind” would choose this work, which paid about $41,000 a year, if they were bringing in drug smuggling money, Hargrave said.
“He was a hell of a worker,” she said. “He’s got good judgment and I could trust him.”
She said Guerena talked constantly about his wife and two sons, Joel and Jose Jr., 5, who’d gone to school the morning of the shooting. “I know he was definitely in love with his wife and in love with his kids,” she said.
Kevin Stephens, a chief steward at Mission mine and head of the miners’ union there, said bluntly: “Personally, I think he was murdered, and that is the feeling that is out here.”
But the sheriff’s office said just because Guerena was a Marine and worked at a mine doesn’t mean he couldn’t be involved in drug trafficking.
“We know from our experiences that good people turn their lives around and do bad things, and this guy was bad irrespective of his honorable discharge as a Marine,” said sheriff’s chief of investigations Rick Kastigar.
He said Guerena was suspected of involvement in a drug operation that specialized in ripping off other smugglers. One tip held that Guerena was “the muscle” of the organization, or in Kastigar’s words, “the individual that was directed to exact revenge.”
An affidavit supporting the search warrant that precipitated the raid describes the department’s suspicions about Guerena in a drug investigation that appeared more focused on his brother, and his brother’s father-in-law. Guerena’s brother does not have a listed number and other family members have ignored written requests from the AP for comment.
Sheriff’s Capt. Chris Nanos, who heads the criminal investigations division and oversaw the Guerena case, said that high-powered rifles and bulletproof vests that were found in Guerena’s home after the shooting back up investigators’ belief that Guerena was involved in drug trafficking. A shotgun found in the home was reported stolen in Tucson in 2008.
In the affidavit, sheriff’s Detective Alex Tisch laid out the case against Guerena’s family. It details two instances of drug seizures, one in April 2009 in which Jose Guerena was found in a home with other people who had just dropped off 1,000 pounds of marijuana at a separate residence, and another in October 2009 in which a man who had met with Guerena’s brother was found with drugs and weapons.
Neither Guerena nor his brother was charged.
The affidavit also cites two traffic stops of Jose Guerena.
The first was on Jan. 28, 2009, when an officer pulled Guerena and two other men over north of Tucson. The officer seized a gun from Guerena, a marijuana pipe from Guerena’s cousin and marijuana hidden in canisters of lemonade and hot cocoa that were under the feet of Guerena’s friend.
The officer arrested Guerena on charges of weapons misconduct, marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia. But prosecutors filed no charges against him.
The other stop came Sept. 15, 2009, when the sheriff’s office pulled over a truck leaving the home of Guerena’s brother. Jose Guerena was in the passenger seat and another man was driving. Officers searched the truck and found commercial-sized rolls of plastic wrap that they say are commonly used to package marijuana. No arrests were made.
Tisch wrote in the affidavit that the past arrests of Guerena and members of his family, combined with observations during months of surveillance led detectives to believe that the family was operating a mid-level drug-trafficking organization in the Tucson area.
The investigation is ongoing, the sheriff’s office says.
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After the SWAT video circulated, people who didn’t know Guerena traveled from as far as California to march in protest of his shooting, and an Alaska woman began an online petition calling for a federal investigation of the SWAT team. Hundreds of people across the country have written on several Facebook pages dedicated to Guerena with messages that include, “He fought for our country, now we must fight for him.”
The Guereno family’s lawyer, Christopher Scileppi, filed a lawsuit on their behalf seeking damages from the sheriff’s office, the officers involved in the shooting and other officials. The lawsuit didn’t specify how much money the family was seeking, but a notice of claim filed Aug. 9 put the amount at $20 million.
“During this investigation, extremely little evidence, if any, was found to raise even a suspicion that Jose Guerena was involved in any possible drug trafficking ring,” the notice says.
Scileppi said the fact that Guerena had been fired at 71 times and hit 22 times was “grotesque,” and “almost a caricature of an overly excited group of poorly trained law enforcement agents.”
Kastigar sharply disputed that, calling the Pima County SWAT team one of the best of its kind in the nation. “We’re not a bunch of country bumpkins in southern Arizona with big bellies and cowboy hats,” he said.
The shooting was justified, he said, because Guerena pointed his AR-15 at the SWAT officers and said, “I’ve got something for you,” before they opened fire.
The five SWAT team members who shot Guerena believed that he had fired his weapon first, he said. Subsequent investigation revealed that the gun’s safety was on and hadn’t been fired. Ultimately, that is not an issue, Kastigar said.
“What reasonable person comes to the front door and points a rifle at people?” he said. “It takes several milliseconds to flip the switch from safety to fire and take out a couple of SWAT officers. I’m firmly of the opinion that he was attempting to shoot at us.”
The officers laid down “suppressive” fire because one had tripped and fallen and the others thought he’d been shot.
“You point a gun at police, you’re going to get shot,” Kastigar said.
The five officers who shot Guerena declined to speak to the AP through Mike Storie, a police union lawyer who represents them and defends their actions.
“Anytime that they are faced with a serious, imminent and deadly threat, they are entitled and justified to use deadly force,” he said. “And when Guerena came around the corner and lifted an AR-15 and pointed it at them, that provided the justification.”
An independent expert, Chuck Drago, a former longtime SWAT officer for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police who now does consulting on use of force and other law enforcement issues, said that the shooting itself appeared justified.
“It’s a horrible, horrible tragedy, but if they walked in the door and somebody came at them with an assault rifle, that would be a justifiable response,” said Drago. “It doesn’t matter whether he’s innocent or not.”
But after examining elements of the search affidavit, Drago questioned whether the sheriff’s office truly had probable cause.
“When you back up and look at why they’re there in the first place and whether the search warrant was proper, my mind starts struggling,” Drago said. “There are a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense.”
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My comment left under the article just after 5:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, Sunday, November 27, 2011 -
The military and law enforcement organization Oath Keepers marched at Tucson, Arizona, to the home of Vanessa Guerena and her two boys on the morning of May 30, 2011, Memorial Day, to honor Jose’s service to this nation with the U.S. Marines. Video of that march and ceremony held by Oath Keepers at the Guerena home is here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKrSQY_w34M&feature=feedlik
An Oath Keepers article about the lies originally put forth by the Pima County Sheriff’s office to local news outlets, claiming falsely that Jose fired “bullets” at the SWAT officers, is one of a five-part series of articles looking into the current American police state, written under the premise that official U.S. policy was created by private-sector think tanks such as ADL and SPLC and has been adopted by the Department of Homeland Security and disseminated through Fusion Centers all the way down from DHS to your local law enforcement agencies. In a word, the horrendous shooting death of Jose Guerena was an applied Federal policy. Begin reading the articles at Oath Keepers’ national website, here –
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/05/16/an-empire-strikes-home-_-part-one/
Also note: The coroner’s report on the autopsy of Jose Guerena showed no traces of marijuana use, which means that Jose had not smoked pot during the month prior to his death.
Salute!
Elias Alias, Oath Keepers
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Note: When I started writing my comment at just after 5:00 p.m., there were already over nine thousand comments under the article. By 5:45 p.m. my time, more than 10,000 were posted, showing that in less than one hour’s time over a thousand people had made comments. This thing is going viral like I’ve never seen before. Your comments under the article are buried by hundreds of new comments before you can even refresh the page. Oath Keepers are invited to paste in our links for Oath Keepers’ coverage of this story and the video of our march this past Memorial Day to honor Jose’s service.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKrSQY_w34M&feature=feedlik
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/05/16/an-empire-strikes-home-_-part-one/
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Please donate and support Oath Keepers mission, every little bit helps!
November 30th, 2011 at 6:45 am
War Vet Arrested in Ala., Tenn. Officer Shootings
November 30, 2011
Associated Press
FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. — An Iraq war veteran shot an Alabama deputy sheriff in the face during a police stop minutes after a convenience store robbery late Monday, and then led police on a chase into Tennessee, where an officer was wounded during a shootout with the suspect, authorities said Tuesday.
Joseph Scott Shriver, 23, who gave a Lincoln County, Tenn., address but also had a Texas driver’s license, was charged in Tennessee with two counts of attempted murder, evading arrest and possession of a firearm. He has a total bond of $1.6 million.
Madison County, Ala., District Attorney Rob Broussard said Shriver is likely to face attempted murder and assault charges there, according to The Huntsville Times.
Shriver served in the Army from 2008 until last April and was stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, according to the U.S. Army. The former infantryman deployed to Iraq from November 2009 to August 2010. An Army human resources spokesman declined to disclose details of his separation from the service.
In Alabama, Madison County Deputy Brent Beavers remained Tuesday at Huntsville Hospital following surgery and was expected to recover. In Tennessee, Fayetteville police officer Justin Raby was treated and released at a local hospital for injuries from shrapnel and glass during the second shooting.
Madison County, Ala., Sheriff Blake Dorning said in a news conference that the spree began around 11:30 p.m. CST Monday when a convenience store was robbed northeast of Huntsville, Ala.
A short time later, Beavers spotted a vehicle matching the robbery description and pulled over the driver. Dorning said the driver got out and fired multiple rounds at the deputy’s car, striking him in the face.
In a news briefing, Dorning also said a vehicle of the same description was spotted by a Lincoln County deputy, but he lost sight of it.
Lt. Joel Massey, who is in charge of investigations at the Fayetteville Police Department in Tennessee, said Raby and Sgt. Johnny Simmons spotted the suspect in the western part of the county early Tuesday and tried to pull him over. The suspect shot at the two officers, striking their police car several times, authorities said.
Massey said Raby dived into the car to avoid being shot and was injured by glass and shrapnel. Both officers were wearing bulletproof vests. Massey said Simmons returned fire at the suspect, who was armed with an assault rifle and a handgun.
Massey said the suspect drove away, but went off the road into a field and got stuck in the mud. The suspect was taken into custody without incident.
“Everybody is very lucky,” Massey said of the shootings.
http://www.military.com/news/article/war-vet-arrested-in-alabama-tennessee-officer-shootings.html?ESRC=eb.nl
November 30th, 2011 at 8:54 am
This brings back memories of a member of the black powder club that I belonged to in the 1970’s. His name was Kenyon Ballew. To make a long story short, BS information was fed to the feds and local law and his home was raided by people dressed as hippies and armed to the teeth. Ken came out of the shower naked and grabbed an 1847 Colt Walker black powder pistol and was cut down.
Ken’s tale and the Marine Jose Guerena have a common thread…Faulty, unverified, and questionable intelligence gathering.
If you are interested to see where this case will end,
read Kens story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ballew_raid
Darwin Rockantansky
Las Vegas, Nevada
December 5th, 2011 at 11:17 am
Soldier who killed Ga. deputy had drinking problem
Posted by LT. Andrew Poole on October 25, 2011 at 7:15am in Police in the NewsView Postings.The girlfriend of an Army National Guard soldier who fatally shot a sheriff’s deputy and himself told investigators the gunman “definitely had a drinking problem” and grabbed an assault rifle from his trunk after she made him pull over while he was driving drunk, a Georgia sheriff said Monday.
“She said he had been drinking and he was drunk and that when he gets drunk, he gets violent,” Richmond County Sheriff Ronald Strength said. “Why shoot a law enforcement officer? We don’t have that answer.”
Spc. Christopher Michael Hodges, 26, was randomly firing an assault rifle into traffic from behind his car on the side of an Augusta highway at about 1 a.m. Sunday when Deputy James Paugh pulled over and was shot — apparently not realizing at first that Hodges posed a threat, authorities said.
Hodges served in the Tennessee National Guard but had been training at Fort Gordon in Augusta for six months. Strength said Hodges’ girlfriend told police that they had gotten into an argument in the car after he had gotten drunk at a friend’s house.
Hodges pulled off the highway and into the grass after “she got mad and said, ‘Let me out. I want to go home,”‘ Strength said. “That’s when he got out and got the rifle out of the car and started shooting.”
The sheriff said Hodges didn’t shoot at the woman, whose name wasn’t released, but seemed to be randomly firing as he emptied one magazine on the M4 rifle and loaded another. Investigators found at least 40 shell casings, though no motorists reported being hit, Strength said. He said authorities were working to trace the gun, and Fort Gordon officials had determined it didn’t come from the Army post.
Meanwhile investigators were awaiting autopsy results likely ready today that are expected to include tests for drugs and alcohol in Hodges’ blood.
And investigators were still trying to fill in the details of Hodges’ military service for clues to what led to his outburst. Strength said authorities had determined the citizen-soldier had served in Iraq, but he wasn’t sure of the timeline. He also cautioned that, while investigators are interested in whether Hodges suffered from any service-related mental problems, “we’re not psychiatrists or psychologists.”
“There are many things that will never be answered,” Strength said.
The military said Hodges had served on active duty and later in the National Guard at least since 2005, when he was stationed at Fort Stewart with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. His four years based at the southeast Georgia post included a yearlong deployment to Iraq from 2007 to 2008.
According to the Tennessee National Guard, Hodges joined its ranks in February after he’d spent about two years in the Georgia Guard.
“This is a time of deep sorrow for all involved and in the midst of this tragedy our thoughts are first and foremost with the families,” Major Gen. Max Haston, Tennessee’s adjutant general, said in a statement Monday. He said the military is working with civilian authorities to figure out what happened.
Neither Tennessee National Guard nor Fort Gordon officials have said what sort of training Hodges was doing at the post in Augusta.
Paugh was one of Richmond County’s veteran deputies, having served for 17 years. Strength said the slain deputy was off-duty but still wearing his uniform when he was shot.
He said Paugh, 47, was riding his motorcycle home after spending the evening on patrol outside Augusta’s fall fair. Authorities believe the deputy spotted Hodges’ car beside the highway and stopped check.
Investigators found Paugh’s motorcycle lying on its side in the grass, leading them to believe Hodges opened fire on the deputy before he could put down his kickstand. Evidence shows Paugh fired two shots from his service handgun, but he missed Hodges.
Source: http://www.jacksonsun.com/article/20111025/NEWS01/110250305/1002/rss
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Deputy Sheriff
James “JD” D. Paugh
Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, Georgia
End of Watch: Sunday, October 23, 2011 Bio & Incident Details
Age: 47
Tour: 17 years
Badge # T-31
Cause: Gunfire
Incident Date: 10/23/2011
Weapon: Rifle
Suspect: Committed suicide
Deputy Sheriff JD Paugh was shot and killed after stopping behind a vehicle on the side of I-520, near Gordon Highway, at approximately 1:20 am.
Deputy Paugh had just gotten off duty and was driving his department motor unit home when he observed a vehicle on the side of the highway. Possibly believing it was disabled, he started to stop his motorcycle behind it. Before he was able to put his kickstand down, a male occupant of the vehicle opened fire with an M4 rifle. Deputy Paugh returned fire three times, wounding the subject in the arm, before his service weapon was struck by a round and disabled.
The subject fired over over 30 rounds at Deputy Paugh, striking him at least nine times. The man then committed suicide before responding units arrived at the scene.
It is believed that the male occupant and his girlfriend were engaged in a domestic dispute at the time Deputy Paugh observed the vehicle and stopped.
Deputy Paugh had served with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office for 17 years. He is survived by his son, mother, and brother.
Read more: http://www.odmp.org/officer/20999-deputy-sheriff-james-jd-d-paugh#ixzz1fgmlWkP9