What began as a carefully orchestrated drug raid by Arizona police ended in chaos, bloodshed and outrage. Now, a young Marine veteran is dead, leaving his wife and two young boys to mourn for him on this Memorial Day, after he made it through two tours in Iraq.
The tragic assault also opened a rare window into the military-style tactics and equipment of police Special Weapons Assault Teams locked in a bloody war with Mexican drug cartels — including military-style armored vehicles and two types of robots also found on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
The May 5 assault by a Pima County SWAT team on an address on Red Water Street, outside Tucson, was meant to apprehend a suspected member of a “rip crew” — a team of heavily-armed thugs, working for one of the cartels, that steals drugs from rival cartels. The special-weapons team, made up of at least seven men and seen in the leaked helmet-camera footage above, would pull up in a “Bearcat” vehicle — a sort of law-enforcement-optimized Humvee. Then they’d bust into the single-story house, hold the occupants at gunpoint and serve a search warrant, looking for drugs, illegal weapons and other evidence of cartel involvement. Just another day for a team accustomed to risky missions.
But something went very wrong. And within seconds of ramming in the door, the SWAT team opened fire, killing Jose Guerena, the owner of the house. Guerena, a 26-year-old Marine veteran, reportedly confronted the police with an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, possibly to protect his wife and kids, who were huddled in rooms behind him.
The SWAT team initially said Guerena shot first; later reports claimed Guerena never fired — indeed, he never took his AR-15 off “safe.” The Medical Examiner counted 22 bullet wounds in Guerena’s body after the raid, CNN reported. Other chilling details can be found in SWAT commander Bob Krygier’spost-operation interview with a Pima County detective.
After the brief but intense gunfight, the SWAT troopers pulled back, out of the house that had filled with smoke from discharging weapons. They didn’t know if the house’s defender was dead or alive … or alone. After luring Guerena’s family out of the house using a megaphone, Krygier decided to deploy the team’s first robot — a tossable “throw-bot,” equipped with a simple video camera.
Throw-bots have been around for years. But the machines have serious limitations. The Israeli army, one of the biggest throw-bot users, has complained that using a throw-bot early in an assault can sacrifice the element of surprise. What could be more obvious than a several-pound robot crashing through a window to land at your feet?That might explain why Krygier waited until after the first round of fighting to send the team’s throw-bot sailing into the house.
With tiny wheels and rudimentary cameras, throw-bots also have mobility and vision problems. Those limitations were very much in evidence that morning on Red Water Street.
Krygier huddled over the throw-bot’s control panel with a deputy named Korza, whom the commander Krygier described as the “most knowledgeable on our team with the, um, electronics.” It took some time for Korza, following Krygier’s directions, to maneuver the tiny ‘bot down a hallway into the living room where Guerena had been shot.
Even with the throw-bot perched near the Marine’s body, the SWAT troopers couldn’t make out much detail. Krygier couldn’t tell whether Guerena was dead or alive, and whether his weapon was a shotgun or a rifle. “It’s not the greatest video quality,” the SWAT commander said.
With the clock ticking, Krygier and Korza grew desperate. “We actually run the robot into him. Um, no, no response.”
By then, police reinforcement had arrived, including a bomb squad equipped with a larger robot, possibly an Andros F6A, pictured above. The 500-pound, four-wheeled Andros, in widespread military use, boasts much better sensors and mobility than the lightweight throw-bot — and can even beoutfitted with a shotgun for blasting apart bombs.
After a pause to evacuate surrounding houses, Krygier ordered the Andros into the living room where Guerena’s body still lay. Studying the images beamed back from the Andros’ main camera, police paramedics were able to describe Guerena’s condition to a SWAT doctor. There was “a lot of blood,” Krygier recalled. The Marine was “not moving at all.”
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. forcesperform 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.
Posts
