'What Were You Guys Thinking? Why Did You Kill Him?'

by William Norman Grigg

"Why, why did you kill him?" a traumatized Vanessa Guerena begged to know as she was interrogated in a makeshift "command center" by detectives from the same Sheriff's Office that had just slaughtered her husband Jose. Her questioners, eager to exploit her trauma to extract information, initially refused to give her a straightforward answer.

Jose, who had finished a graveyard shift at the Asarco copper mine, was sleeping when a SWAT team from the Pima County Sheriff's Office laid siege to his home on the morning of May 5. Vanessa was doing laundry, and the couple's four-year-old son Joel was watching Transformers, when the SWAT raiders pulled up in a Bear Cat armored vehicle.

The siren sounded for less than ten seconds; just a few seconds later, the order to "breach" the door was given because, as on-scene commander Deputy Bob Krygier later explained, nobody inside the house had "submitted to our authority."

Vanessa initially thought that there was an emergency "somewhere in the neighborhood," and called the police. When she saw armed intruders on her property, Vanessa screamed for her husband to wake up. Jose told Vanessa to take their younger son (whose older brother, Jose, Jr., was in school) and hide in the closet, while he went to confront the invaders.

Seconds later, Jose was sprawled face-first in a pool of his own blood, shredded by dozens of rounds fired by the SWAT team. That's how his four-year-old son would later find him. Joel was left alone after Vanessa, who had gone out to plead for someone to get medical help for her husband, was assaulted and brutalized by the SWAT operators and then detained for questioning. The child remained alone in the house with the body of his dead father while Krygier developed a "tactical team" to extract the child at minimal risk. That is, minimal risk to the berserkers who had just killed Joel's dad.

As the minutes dragged on, one of the SWAT operators – according to Krygier – grew impatient over being forbidden to enter the home.

"Might as well finish what I started," groused the armored assailant. I suspect he wasn't referring to the need to render timely medical aid, unless he intended to administer "one behind the ear" as a form of Kevorkian-style treatment.

Krygier and his little band of heroes were decked out in full SWAT regalia – "I had my body armor on, a duty belt with a side holster, a ballistic helmet, clear sunglasses, [and] a handgun," he later reported. Yet the paramount consideration of "officer safety" prevented SWAT team members from rescuing Joel in a timely fashion, or even confirming first-hand that Jose was dead. Rather than rendering aid, or permitting the paramedics to treat Jose, the SWAT team – bold, valiant badasses, every one of them – huddled in the Bear Cat and sent in a robot to poke and nudge the victim to make sure he was dead.

Despite the fact that one member of the squad, Deputy Jay Korza, is a medic, nobody went into the house and "physically" confirmed Jose's death, Krygier later explained to detectives. Instead, a call was placed to "our SWAT doctor, Dr. [Tammy] Kastre ... [who] pronounced him dead in the way that doctors do."

This indifferent and perfunctory confirmation was an appropriate coda to a SWAT assault that began with an entirely spurious search warrant. Michael Storie, the police union attorney representing Jose Guerena's killers, has admitted that neither Jose nor his home was specifically mentioned in the warrant, which was served as part of a "complex investigation" into an alleged marijuana smuggling and home invasion robbery ring.

Three other homes were hit the same morning that the SWAT team gunned down Jose Guerena. But his was the only home devoid of anything resembling evidence in a criminal investigation. Thus it is remarkable that Jose, according to Krygier, was considered "the main bad guy" in this purported criminal syndicate, which was supposedly "hiring out to do rip crews – to steal other people's marijuana and perform home invasions."

Assuming that gang actually exists, it would best be described as a private SWAT team, given that it would be carrying out exactly the same kinds of missions conducted every day by tactical police units in the "war on drugs." This would mean that the May 5 SWAT raids weren't so much a law enforcement exercise as a turf war between rival criminal gangs.

Distant relatives of the Guerena family were killed in a home invasion robbery about a year ago; that fact was described by Krygier as a "connection" to a "double homicide." Other relatives are allegedly involved in narcotics trafficking, but Guerena himself has no criminal record. The former Marine worked long shifts on a predictable schedule at the local mine.

If Guerena was involved in criminal activity, a low-key arrest was eminently feasible, as was a conventional search of the home. But that's not how things are done in the American Reich. It's far more convenient – and, one supposes, a lot more fun – for the police to employ what will someday be known as the Jose Guerena Model: Lay siege to the home with a paramilitary death squad, gun down the suspect, and then interrogate his terrorized wife.

When the questioning began, Vanessa thought Jose might still be alive. She still harbored a faint, fugitive hope that the armed strangers who had invaded her home had taken her husband to the hospital. It wasn't until the detectives had begun the interrogation that she was able to learn that Jose had died.

As the numbness of pure horror began to wear off, the newly minted 26-year-old widow started to feel the effects of injuries sustained when she had been roughly seized from her home, thrown to the ground, stepped on, and otherwise "treated like a criminal" by the death squad that had just poured at least twenty rounds into her husband. That treatment continued – albeit in a more subtle fashion – after she was placed in the custody of the detectives.

"You're not allowed to leave," explained Detective Dan Preuss, who insisted that this "doesn't mean you're under arrest." That was a lie, of course: Any time a police officer presumes to detain a citizen, the detainee is under arrest. That Preuss was deceiving Vanessa about this – as he was trained to – is demonstrated by the fact that he and his comrades took several minutes to Mirandize Vanessa in both English and Spanish.

"We don't trap you in a room and say, `talk to us,'" Preuss assured Vanessa as he and his colleagues did precisely that. As Preuss worked to extract information from Vanessa that could potentially have been used to incriminate her, the detective repeatedly told the horrified young woman that her questions would be answered in due time. But the only question to which she wanted an answer was the one she asked immediately after the raid: "What were you guys thinking?"

A few minutes after the questioning began, Vanessa asked the detectives why there had been a search warrant for her family's home. In a moment of depraved creativity, one of them insisted that "I can't answer your questions" because at that point Vanessa hadn't been Mirandized – an answer demonstrating, once again, that the young wife and mother, whose husband had just been killed while defending his family, was being treated as a criminal suspect.

Full story HERE