Reason...
Marine Survives Two
Tours in Iraq, SWAT Kills Him
Tim Cavanaugh
May 16, 2011
“Please send me an ambulance and you can ask more questions later,
please!”
Guerena tells the dispatcher that her husband had returned home about
6:30 a.m. after work and was sleeping.
Prompted by the dispatcher, Guerena says her husband was shot in the
stomach and hands.
The dispatcher asks Guerena to put her cheek next to her husband’s nose
and mouth to see if he’s breathing, but she replies in Spanish that her
husband is face- down.
The operator tells Guerena to grab a cloth and apply pressure to his
wounds, but the wife responds frantically: “I can’t! I can’t! There’s a
bunch of people outside of my house. I don’t know what the heck is
happening!”
A dispatcher asks if the people outside are the SWAT members. “I think
it’s the SWAT, but they ... Oh my God!” Guerena says.
A dispatcher asks that she open the door for the SWAT, but Guerena
replies that the door was already opened by police.
“Is anybody coming? Is anybody coming?” she asks.
The operator tells Guerena help is on the way, but they’re still trying
to figure out what happened.
“I don’t know, that’s it, whatever I told you, that’s it,” Guerena says.
Just after the five-minute mark, Guerena’s end of the line goes silent.
The two dispatchers spend about four minutes talking to each other and
calling out for Guerena while trying to figure out if the call is
coming from the same residence where the warrant was served. At the end
of the 10-minute 911 call, a dispatcher says she has confirmation that
Guerena is outside with deputies on the scene.
This is from Arizona Daily Star reporter Fernanda Echavarri’s effort to
piece together the death of Jose Guerena, 26, at the hands of a Pima
County, Arizona SWAT team. Guerena, who joined the Marines in 2002 and
served two tours in Iraq, was killed just after 9 a.m. May 5.
Guerera had just gone to bed after working a 12-hour shift at a local
mine when his home was invaded as part of a multi-house crackdown by
sheriff’s deputies.
Like enemy of the state Osama bin Laden, Guerena died with his wife
close by. Widow Vanessa Guerena, who hid with her four-year-old son
when sheriff’s deputies raided the home, fills in detail that has been
slow to come from Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik’s office:
“When I came out the officers dragged me through the kitchen and
took me outside, and that’s when I saw him laying there gasping for
air,” Vanessa Guerena said. “I kept begging the officers to call an
ambulance that maybe he could make it and that my baby was still
inside.”
The little boy soon after walked out of the closet on his own. SWAT
members took him outside to be with his mother.
“I never imagined I would lose him like that, he was badly injured but
I never thought he could be killed by police after he served his
country,” Vanessa Guerena said.
The family’s 5-year-old son was at school that morning and deputies say
they thought Guerena’s wife and his other child would also be gone when
they entered the home.
Guerena says there were no drugs in their house.
Deputies said they seized a “large sum of money from another house”
that morning. But they refused to say from which of the homes searched
that morning they found narcotics, drug ledgers or drug paraphernalia.
Court documents showing what was being sought and was found have not
been made public. A computer check on Guerena revealed a couple of
traffic tickets and no criminal history.
Tucson KGUN’s Joel Waldman says the SWAT team prevented paramedics from
going to work on Guerena for one hour and fourteen minutes.
The sheriff’s department maintains that Guerena was holding an AR-15
when the paramilitary force fired 71 bullets in his home, but other key
parts of the government story have collapsed. While PCSD initially
claimed Guerena fired the weapon he was alleged to have been holding,
the department now says it was a misfire by one of the deputies that
caused this deadly group panic inside a home containing a woman and a
toddler:
A deputy’s bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood
to fall on his shield. That prompted some members of the team to think
the deputy had been shot, [PCSD spokesman Michael] O’Connor said.
This is the play-by-play; read the follow-up and questions at Reason
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