More on the Murder of Jose Guerena: 71 Shots

Update: Radley Balko (The Agitator) has written an article on this story at Huffington Post. It’s worth reading, as he reveals new information.

I wrote last weekend about the trigger-happy SWAT team of Clarence Dupnik’s Pima Count Sheriff’s department. The fired 71 shots at Jose Guerena, who had picked up a weapon to defend his family when his wife saw armed men invading their home. The SWAT guys claimed he had fired on them, so they cut loose on him, hitting him 60 times.  Turns out he never took the safety off of his weapon; one of the SWAT team members accidentally discharged his weapon. The Sheriff’s department tried to cover that up, but the fact that Guerena never fired was hard to conceal.

Bob Owens of Pajamas Media writes more about how Guerena managed to survive two tours of duty in Iraq, but couldn’t survive his own government’s “war on drugs.”

So when Dupnik’s teams attempted a complicated four-house raid of minority families looking for drugs, perhaps bigotry and prejudice really was in play.

Perhaps Dupnik’s officers assumed every Hispanic accused of being a drug dealer really was one, and perhaps they assumed that the tenant of a home protecting his loved ones must be a bloodthirsty cartel member waiting in ambush. Is that why they gunned down a tired, hard-working father sleeping off a night shift at the local copper mine? A Marine veteran of Iraq that had the discipline not to fire — a discipline that a trigger-happy SWAT team which has now killed three men in less than a year cannot itself exercise?

Not only has the Pima Sheriff’s Department tried to justify firing 71 shots at one man in a small hallway, hitting him (thankfully, just him) 60 times in a home where his wife and child were present. They’ve attempted to justify their refusal to let a team of paramedics treat Guereña, who was still miraculously alive after being sprayed mercilessly with bullets. It takes a competent SWAT team just a handful of minutes to “clear” a residential home during a raid. Dupnik’s SWAT team refused to declare the scene “clear” for an agonizing one hour and 14 minutes, and not until Jose Guereña had already died.

The point of his piece is that police, in Arizona and elsewhere, are conducting too many paramilitary-style raids on private residences, especially in situations where there’s no imminent threat to life. People are being shot and killed for no justifiable reason, except perhaps they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Read the rest at Pajamas Media

There’s another story about this unjustified killing at Reason