Marine Killed In Arizona

LCpl. Jose Guerena

By Semperpapa

United States Marine LCpl. Jose Guerena was killed in Tucson, Arizona, last Thursday morning. A two-deployments Veteran of the Iraq War, Guerena was killed when officers of the Sheriff Department of Pima County raided his home and shot him 70 times.

I started following this case since it first appeared on the Internet, because it did not make the national news.

My tendency is to first give the law enforcement officers the benefit of the doubt, as I know first hand the level of pressure that is inherent with the job and the evil they encounter on a daily basis.

What made this case peek my interest was the fact that the Sheriff Office keeps on changing the story. Initially the situation developed when the SWAT team raided the home where Guerena lived with his wife and 4-year-old son. According to Vanessa Guerena, wife of Jose, she woke her husband up when she noticed the shadow of a man with a gun through one of the home window. Her testimony is that Jose told her to hide with the child in a bathroom closet while he grabbed his AR-15 rifle and checked what they thought may be an attempt at a home invasion and robbery (we must consider the location of the raid, Tucson, where illegal aliens home invasions are not rare).

As the SWAT officers broke down the door they found Jose crouching with his rifle and started to shoot. 70 shots later, Guerena was down. Vanessa also contends that the officers pulled her and her child out of the home while her husband was still alive in the front room, and yet it took one hour for paramedics to be allowed to enter the home and tend to Jose.

If this was not suspicious enough, Vanessa Guerena also states that the Sheriff Deputies never identified themselves as such before breaking down the door, while s spokesman for the Sheriff had stated that the raid had been conducted with marked patrol cars, lights and sirens.

Why is this suspicious? Mostly because the story keeps on changing. Initially it was stated that Jose fired first, than it was found that while his weapon had a chambered round it was still on safe. And the fact that a SWAT raid for alleged narcotics violations would be conducted with “lights and sirens” on is against every police protocol I have heard of in the past for such type of operations.

The Sheriff’s Office also stated that the search of the home netted some evidences of narco conspiracy, but all evidences have been sealed after the action, including the warrant information, which all smells of cover up and leaves me with painful ambiguity.

If all the evidences of the raid substantiate the actions of the SWAT unit, the public should be allowed to clearly see them to show that Jose Guerena represented the risk that warranted his killing. Keeping everything hidden, considering that Jose had a honored service record and no criminal record whatsoever, brings up painful questions. Did the officers have the wrong house? Were they predisposed to their conduct by whom Jose was? Did they overreact and are now hiding the facts?

The answers to these questions may never be fully found, but the fact that the deputies are from the ranks of Sheriff Dupnik, makes the situation even harder to digest. Who is Dupnik, for those who may not remember? Dupnik is the character that achieved national notoriety, at least his fifteen minutes of infamy, in the aftermath of the shooting last January in Tucson that left six people dead and House Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wounded. Dupnik is one of those political hacks who took advantage of that situation to advance his liberal agenda for the subversion of the First and Second Amendment of the Constitution.

In following this tragic story, my thoughts went straight to the report that Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security put out in 2009 identifying as a domestic terrorist source, returning right wing war Veterans that may have hostility toward the government. Did such mentality on the part of the government paint a huge target on the back of Jose Guerena?

This appears to be a case in desperate need of independent investigation, but as of today, no word has been uttered by either the ACLU or the Justice Department. Not that I expected anything from either source as Jose Guerena did not fit the protected section of the population: he was not black nor a Muslim.

The raid that cost the life of Jose Guerena is a stark contrast with the cultural sensitivity that federal agents demonstrated in raiding a Florida mosque to arrest one Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, the mosque imam who is under federal indictment for providing financial support to al Qaeda. Under the new rules of engagement for federal agents, rules instituted by the Obama regime to demonstrate cultural sensibility toward Muslims, the officers waited for prayer time to be over and even removed their shoes as they entered the mosque to execute the arrest warrant. Amazing how culturally sensitive we are required to be in the handling of Islamic terrorists all the while not even consider human sensibility when dealing with a young man who also happen to be a Marine War Veteran.

Our country is truly in a world of hurt!

Just my thoughts!