Seventy-One Shots: The Death of Jose Guereña

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. — Mark Twain

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik infamously railed in January of this year that Arizona is a “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

One must wonder if the “prejudice and bigotry” he considers endemic to Arizona is to blame for the death of U.S. Marine veteran Jose Guereña, killed when Dupnik deputies gunned him down in his home. They fired 71 shots. They hit him 60 times. And then, as if this wasn’t enough, Dupnik’s deputies blocked paramedics for an hour and 14 minutes from approaching the scene, denying Guereña treatment until he was assuredly dead.

Dupnik’s SWAT team initially claimed that Guereña fired at them while they were serving a warrant — as he slept. They claimed that his bullets hit the bulletproof shield that the entry team hid behind, and that the barrage of bullets they fired back was in self-defense.

Only, Guereña never fired his weapon. Awoken by his wife with screams that men with guns were invading his home and threatening his family, Jose Guereña armed himself with a AR-15 rifle and crouched in the hallway. The SWAT team unloaded upon Guereña on sight. He apparently recognized the home invaders as police. He took 60 rounds, but never — as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was forced to admit — took off his weapon’s safety as he was being killed.

The Arizona Daily Star reports:

“The wife of a Tucson man killed in a Pima County SWAT raid May 5 pleaded for five minutes with 911 dispatchers to send an ambulance for her mortally wounded husband, audio records show.

Often through tears and sometimes in broken English, Vanessa Guereña, tells 911 operators that her husband had been shot by a "bunch of people" who opened the door of their southwest-side home and "just shoot him." Meanwhile, dispatchers worked to determine if she was calling from a house where the SWAT team was serving a search warrant, audio released Friday by Drexel Heights Fire Department reveals. It takes about an hour for waiting medics to know what happened, and the man is dead before fire crews are allowed into the home.

Jose Guereña, 26, a former Marine, was sleeping after the graveyard shift at Asarco Mission mine about 9:30 a.m. when his wife woke him saying she heard noises outside and a man was at their window. Guereña told his wife to hide in a closet with their 4-year-old son, his wife has said. He grabbed an AR-15 rifle and moments later was slumped in the kitchen, mortally wounded from a hail of gunfire.

For about five minutes after Guereña was shot, his wife stays on the phone trying to explain what happened and asking for an ambulance.

More than a week later, few details about the investigation that brought the SWAT team to the home Guereña shared with his wife and their two young sons are known. Details of the search warrant have not been made public and deputies would not comment on what was seized from the home.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department has provided no details about the investigation that prompted the raid and little information about the moments leading up to 71 gunshots being fired at Guereña, whose gun had the safety on. He was shot 60 times, doctors told the family. Initially the Sheriff's Department said Guereña fired at officers, but they retracted that this week. Drexel Heights provided audio of the 911 calls after the Star filed a public records request.

Vanessa Guereña, 27, continuously asks the operator to "please, please" send somebody to help her husband in a call in which she seems desperate, frustrated and panicked and says she could hear people talking outside.

About a minute into the 911 call a dispatcher who says she is with the Sheriff's Department comes on and asks if the SWAT team was at her house. Guereña sounds confused, and says her husband isn't talking to her anymore. She then talks over two operators who are trying to figure out if the house in the 7100 block of South Redwater Drive is among those targeted to be searched that morning as part of an investigation.

The operator asks again if there were law enforcement officers at her house and Guereña says yes, that they're outside. She then adds that they had come inside earlier, shot her husband and pointed a "big ol' gun" at her. She grabbed her son and worried she would be shot.”

It was, you’ll recall, a claim Dupnik made in the wake of Jared Loughner’s bloody rampage at a “Congress in your Corner” event at a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, where six were killed and 14 others were injured — including, gravely, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Dupnik was attempting to blame the conservative Tea Party movement for the shooting when he made the comment. And even after it was revealed that Loughner’s few known political views had been described as “quite liberal,” and were in fact muddled at best, he refused to retract his slur.

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.

A cynic might be tempted to suggest Dupnik’s SWAT team was waiting for the only witness to their assault to die. Considering how the Sheriff’s Department has acted since they stormed the home, a rational person might be tempted to agree.

Not content to blame the victim for his own death, they attempted to insinuate he was a drug dealer, even though they were forced to admit under direct questioning that no drugs were found in his home, and that a clumsy cop falling down may have triggered the bloodbath.

Vanessa Guereña claims that neither she nor her husband heard the officers announce themselves as police. As anyone who has ever seen an episode of any popular police reality show knows, no entry team waits 15 seconds after announcing themselves to batter down a door and rush the inhabitants — as Pima County Lt. Michael O’Connor claims his SWAT team did. Identical scenes of immediate entry upon announcement (or after breaching), without giving those inside a chance to react, is a standard tactic captured again and again.

Why Lt. Michael O’Connor decided to tell a mistruth about a well-known, heavily documented, and highly standardized technique isn’t immediately clear. Perhaps it is because of the inevitable wrongful death lawsuit to be filed against the Pima County Sheriff’s Department on behalf of Vanessa Guereña and her two children. Or perhaps it is because of the possible DOJ civil rights investigation. Perhaps Dupnik’s employees simply are unable to act any more professionally after a raid than they do during one.

No-knock warrants are typically used to surprise the target of raids and keep them from disposing of evidence, with possible violence from the offender cited as justification for the military-style use of heavy armor and machine guns.

Jose Guereña’s death was entirely preventable. Over-armed, over-amped law enforcement is causing far more harm to the public than other tactics and techniques possibly could.

The over-militarization of law enforcement agencies and over-use of SWAT teams is an idea that needs to be revisited in a sane society. Too many good people have been traumatized, and too many killed, under the flimsiest of circumstances.

Guereña was a Tucson native and Flowing Wells High School graduate. He joined the Marines in 2002. He served two tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2005 as part of the Yuma-based MWSS-173. After surviving two tours of duty in Iraq, only to lose his life in an encounter with Clarence Dupnik’s keystone cops, Jose Guereña was buried with full military honors.

The Guereña family has retained the services Christopher Scileppi to file a wrongful death suit against Pima County and Sheriff Dupnik. He has also requested the Justice Department to open an investigation into the shooting. Will Eric Holder do so or is only concerned about the Black Panthers? On the other hand where is NCIS when we need them.