An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armoured vehicle pulled into the ******'s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff's department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a 'boom' and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a *** outside.
A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his ******, she said, when he grabbed his own *** — an AR-15 assault rifle.
What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting 'Police!' in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds ****** before they opened fire into the house.
And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and ***** cowered in a closet.
'Hurry up, he's ********,' Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. 'I don't know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance.'
When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and ********, and that her young *** was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his ****** in a puddle of ***** on the floor.
But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pyjamas, ******.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a ****-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a ***. The county prosecutor's office says the shooting was justified.
But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a ******'s life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A ****** lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff's office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff's 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views.
The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:
'Why, why, why was he ******?'
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