Drug Raid Turns Ugly as SWAT Guns Down Marine Vet

[Feuer Frei!]

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’s post-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.


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