A video was released today showing the house raid on 26 year old Marine veteran Jose Guerena. A heavily armed SWAT team, following orders from their leaders in the War on Drugs, approached the suburban home, bashed down the door, and got into a firefight with a man who survived two tours in Iraq and seemed to be harming no one. They killed him in his home that day on May 5.
There is lots of good commentary on this militarized form of law enforcement now increasingly popular in the land of the free. But here is David Axe’s, over at Wired, closing comments:
The doctor declared Guerena dead. “But we wanna still, you know, go in and put eyes on, just, just to be sure,” Krygier said. So the SWAT sergeant came up with a plan. “Very slow … methodical,” is how he described it. Police re-entered the house, moving room to room until they caught up with the robots in the living room. There, they confirmed that Guerena was indeed deceased, part of his brain exposed to the air.
Now the police could finally conduct the search that was the entire justification for the raid. They found no drugs, but did discover another AR-15, plus a third rifle and two handguns. There were also several sets of body armor and a hat bearing the U.S. Border Patrol logo. None of these items is necessarily illegal or, for a Marine, even uncommon. But Krygier told his debriefer that the weapons and armor were consistent with what a cartel rip crew would possess.
Nearly a month after Guerena’s killing, it’s still unclear whether the Marine had any ties to a cartel. But the absence of clear evidence means we must assume he was innocent. It’s equally unclear, at least to outsiders, precisely how the shooting went down and who’s to blame.
One thing is clear. With military-grade vehicles, armor, assault weapons and robots, the raid on Guerena’s home was all but indistinguishable from the kind of house-clearing operations U.S. forces perform every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guerena survived two tours in the desert only to perish in a military-style action in his own home.
