Barrett Garese

At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate. Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot—or even switching his rifle off of “safety”—he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

Cops With Machine Guns: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police - The Atlantic

This is a terrifying trend, and not at all how any country with any semblance of “civilization” operates.

Just in case you’re not furious yet, here’s the official verdict from Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall:

Under the circumstances, and based upon our review of all the available evidence, we have concluded that the use of deadly forces by the SWAT Team members was reasonable and justified under the law. Accordingly, the Pima County Attorney’s Office finds no basis to prosecute.

A man is shot dozens of times inside his suburban home for being wrongly suspected of being a criminal, paramedics were then instructed to hold back for an hour and fourteen minutes, and he subsequently dies in front of his family - “no basis to prosecute.”

God bless America.

Source: The Atlantic