Jose [Guerena] was sleeping after finishing a graveyard shift at a local copper mine when he heard his terrified wife, Vanessa, scream that there were armed men on their property. Jose, an honorably discharged Marine who served two tours in Iraq, told Vanessa to take their four-year-old son, Jose, Jr., and hide in the closet. He grabbed his legally obtained AR-15 rifle and placed himself between his family and the intruders, where he died following a 71-shot fusillade. [
It was later discovered that the safety on Guerena's AR-15 had never been released. - OB]
The home invaders, being police officers, were very poor marksmen, which accounts for the fact that only 22 of the shots actually hit the victim, and none of the wounds was fatal — if immediate medical care had been provided. The SWAT team included a medic who had both the ability and the legal responsibility to provide aid. Instead, the team turned away paramedics who arrived shortly after the shooting in response to Vanessa’s frantic 911 call. They then assaulted Vanessa after she had tearfully pleaded with them to help her dying husband, and delivered her to be interrogated by detectives about the contents of the home — which underscored the fact that
the search warrant used to justify the SWAT raid was invalid, since it didn’t accuse Jose of a specific crime, or list specific items being sought.
While Vanessa was being abused, and Jose was bleeding to death, the couple’s traumatized four-year-old son was left alone in the home, because the raiders — restrained by the sacred imperative of officer safety — refused to enter the home and retrieve the youngster until they were sure that his father was dead. Jose, Jr. eventually staggered out of the home by himself, most likely after witnessing the death rattle of the loving father who had shielded him, and his mother, with his body.
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