26-year-old Jose Guerena, pictured in full regalia, was an ex-marine and Iraq veteran who served faithfully for two tours. He was brutally gunned down early last month inside his own home, shot at 71 times after his door was kicked in by an Arizona SWAT team on the morning of May 5th.
Jose’s only crime, for which he was summarily executed, was owning a gun. He drew a weapon when he was awakened by the sound of his door being kicked in, by what he thought were home invaders.
Jose’s wife, Vanessa Guerena, saw armed men approaching their home. When she shouted to her husband, who was sleeping in the next room after working a night shift at the local Asarco copper mine, he woke up, jumped out of bed and told his wife to hide in the closet with their 4-year-old son, Joel.
It turns out that Jose’s in-laws were murdered in a separate home invasion in Tuscon just one year ago, so it’s more than understandable why his family might react suspiciously to a large group of armed men approaching the house.
Jose Guerena armed himself with a AR-15 rifle and crouched in the hallway. The SWAT team kicked down his door immediately after giving one verbal warning. Then they unloaded on Jose on sight, firing 71 rounds total and hitting him 22 times.
Although the Pima County SWAT team was ostensibly there to serve a drug warrant, no drugs were found in the home. Weeks later, upon autopsy, it was revealed that there were also no drugs in Jose’s system.
The raid was captured on helmet camera and released amid public outcry over the shooting.
Most experts consider the raid extremely botched.
Immediately after the incident, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office claimed that Guerena had fired at them first. But within a week, they backtracked and said he had not. “The safety was on and he could not fire,” according to the sheriff’s official statement.
As Jose lay bleeding to death in his hallway, the police refused to allow paramedics entry to the scene for an hour and fourteen minutes. During that time, they pulled his wife out of the house, and sent in robots to poke and prod at Jose’s unmoving body while he bled to death from twenty-two bullet wounds.
Police waited until they were sure Jose was dead before entering the house again, despite having trained medics on site.
Call records from Drexel Heights Fire rescue say an ambulance was on the way at 9:43am. It arrived just two minutes later. But the ambulance crew was told to wait outside.
Law enforcement usually holds back medical crews to be sure they’re not walking into danger.
The Drexel Heights crew waited until 10:59, then heard Code 900. The radio call that means they were no longer needed. The man was dead.
They had waited an hour and fourteen minutes.
Compare that to the chaos of the January 8th mass shooting. Even with a large open area to secure, medical crews only waited 12 minutes to be allowed in.
The safety was still engaged on Jose’s weapon, despite being shot at 71 times. It turns out the ex-marine had more trigger discipline than the police who were raiding his home.
Despite all of this, because Jose had a weapon, the shooting was cleared this week. None of the Arizona police officers on site were found to have done anything wrong, including the denial of medical treatment.
“Under the circumstances, and based upon our review of all the available evidence, we have concluded that the use of deadly forces by the SWAT Team members was reasonable and justified under the law. Accordingly, the Pima County Attorney’s Office finds no basis to prosecute,” according to the ruling on the raid by Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall.
Circumstantial Evidence Abounds
The SWAT officer shown above, Sergeant Bob Krygier, told investigators that the raid on Guerena’s home was part of a probe on “possible drug running, home invasions and potential homicides.”
The warrant was sealed the by police for several weeks after the shooting. Apparently releasing it would give information about an informant. After nearly a month, the warrant was unsealed and made public with portions redacted.
It essentially contained several pieces of circumstantial evidence that centered around a mid-scale marijuana dealing investigation.
The raid was to gather evidence for marijuana dealing and money laundering investigations that involved several people, including several members of the same family. The primary suspect in the investigation was Jose Guerena’s brother, Alejandro.
Jose’s name was added to the investigation after a traffic stop in 2009. Jose was a passenger in a pickup truck that was carrying commercial rolls of plastic wrap that are commonly used to package marijuana.
Since the killing, there has been no further evidence of Jose being involved with drug running. No drugs were found inside his home, nor has any evidence been released that would connect Jose with any sort of violent acts, as suggested in the original warrant.
The Misplaced Priorities of the NRA
Being a gun owner certainly didn’t protect Jose Guerena from government tyranny. In fact, just the opposite occurred, owning a gun got Jose Guerena killed.
That brings us to the NRA, one of the most powerful lobbies in America. They take in $25 million per year in revenue and represent more than 4.3 million gun owners, across all fifty states.
On paper, the NRA is all about freedom. They are listed as an “advocacy and civil rights” group on various charity sites. One would assume that they would be up in arms over Jose Guerena being shot to death in his own home, with the safety on his gun still on, after his door was kicked down with very little warning of who was outside.
However, the NRA has been entirely mute on the incident. A search of their site doesn’t bring up any results about the Guerena shooting, or, for that matter, any mention of any of the paramilitary-style raids that are becoming more and more widely adopted in the U.S.
A search on the NRA site for information about their position on the war on drugs brings up little substantive information.
There isn’t a single policy position or editorial about the war on drugs to be found.
Let’s compare those results to another leading advocacy and civil rights group on the same topic, the ACLU:
The ACLU web site returns more than 6,000 results. There are dozens of case-studies and profiles of citizens who have been negatively impacted shown in just the first few pages.
While the ACLU does have a broader civil liberties focus than the NRA, the difference here is still fairly staggering. It seems that the NRA is content with simply avoiding any mention of the war on drugs and hoping it’ll just go away on it’s own, even as their veteran members are killed needlessly in their own homes over murky allegations of marijuana trafficking.
Worse still, the NRA continues to endorse Republican political candidates who want to expand the drug war and the unprecedented American prison state, rather than advance legislation based on scientifically-proven, public-health centered drug policies.
Here’s my question to the NRA: Does the second amendment still exist when law-abiding citizens can be gunned down on sight in their own homes for owning weapons? If the answer is no, why aren’t you doing anything about it?
As long as the NRA continues to support socially conservative, moralist politicians who want to expand the war on drugs, there are millions Americans who are being done a great disservice by their gun lobby representation. The second amendment has been effectively nullified when the police can kick down your door and slay you simply for being a gun owner.
Personally, it’s enough to make me switch to a different advocacy group. One that hopefully won’t stand idly by as gun owners are killed because of a forty-year-old, politically-motivated and failed drug war.
