Vin Suprynowicz

They don’t look like cops to me. Dressed in helmets and camouflage fatigues and carrying .223 rifles handed down from the U.S. Army, they look like some ragtag Third World militia as they shuffle up to a suburban front door in broad daylight in a shambling, casual cluster that no non-com who’s ever seen the results of a hand grenade would tolerate.

But they’re cops, all right. It’s 9:15 on a Thursday morning in sunny Tucson, Ariz., May 5, and you can see them force open the door of the three-tour Marine combat veteran who they knew would be sound asleep after returning from his midnight shift at the local copper mine.

You can also listen in as they hit the Marine with 22 of their 71 rounds for the “offense” of answering his door in his high-crime neighborhood carrying his AR-15 — he never flicked off the safety — after his wife woke him up, screaming that there were armed invaders outside.

Watch the “helmet cam” video at:

http://tucson.com/online/video/live-video-tucson-swat-shooting-of-former-marine-jose-guerena/youtube_aff56d40-2188-11e3-9eb7-0019bb2963f4.html

After serving honorably for two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, Jose Guerena came home and got a good job in the Asarco copper mine, 18 miles south of Tucson. In the hours before he died, Jose had worked a 12-hour graveyard shift. After arriving home, he went to sleep.

Two hours later, his wife, Vanessa, heard a noise outside their home and peered out the window. Their younger son, 4-year-old Joel, was with her when she spotted the gunmen. “Jose, Jose, come quickly.”

Vanessa thought the intruders were part of a home invasion. Two members of her sister-in-law’s family, Cynthia and Manny Orozco, were killed last year in their Tucson home.

According to Vanessa, Jose’s last words were: “Vani, go into the closet with the kid. Go!” Then he grabbed his AR-15 and went to confront the people who threatened his family. Seven seconds later, he was dead.

At no time during Vanessa’s 911 call does she say police had shot her husband. In an interview shortly after he died, Vanessa said neither she nor Jose knew who was making noise outside their home. The police did not announce themselves, Vanessa said, until after they’d shot Jose.

“Please send me an ambulance and you can ask more questions later, please!” Vanessa told the 911 dispatcher.

The dispatcher asks her to put her cheek next to her husband’s nose and mouth to determine whether he’s breathing, but she replies in Spanish that her husband is face-down.

The operator tells Guerena to grab a cloth and apply pressure to his wounds, but the wife responds frantically: “I can’t! I can’t! There’s a bunch of people outside of my house. I don’t know what the heck is happening! … Is anybody coming?” she asks.

The operator told Vanessa Guerena help was on the way. It wasn’t.

A computer check on Jose Guerena revealed a couple of traffic tickets but no criminal history.

Joe Waldman of Tucson’s KGUN-TV says the SWAT team prevented paramedics from going to work on Jose Guerena for one hour and fourteen minutes.

Other key parts of the government story have collapsed. While Pima County sheriff’s deputies initially claimed Guerena fired his weapon, the department now says it was a “misfire” by one of the deputies that caused the deadly fusillade inside a home with a woman and a small child. A deputy’s bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood to fall on his shield. That prompted some members of the team to think the deputy had been shot, Pima County sheriff’s spokesman Michael O’Connor said.

Vanessa Guerena says her husband died thinking he was protecting his family from an invasion.

“You’re saying (they) only yelled ‘SWAT’ after the shootout?” asked KGUN reporter Waldman. “Oh, yes! Yes,” said the widow, who insists there were no drugs or money in the home.

Police sure haven’t produced any. They say they were serving a search warrant in a complicated drug case, and that they had found a large amount of cash in a different house in the neighborhood. More recently, apologists for the raid have contended Jose Guerena was under suspicion of registering vehicles belonging to other members of his family under his own name. Now THERE’S a reason to break down a Marine veteran’s door and shoot him dead for “keeping and bearing arms” inside his own home, rather than giving him time to read a search warrant.

Most of the search warrant documents remain sealed, by the way.

Mike Storie, a lawyer for the Pima County SWAT team, said at a news conference that weapons and body armor were found in the Guerena home as well as a photo of Jesus Malverde, whom Storie called a “patron saint drug runner,” according to KGUN.

None of these things is illegal. If you don’t think ex-Marines tend to own a few firearms and an old Kevlar vest, you probably live in New York, New England or San Francisco. And if having a photo of Jesus Malverde, the unofficial Sinaloan “bandit saint” killed in 1909, proves you’re a drug-runner, then having a picture of Robin Hood under your bed proves you’re a poacher.

Storie defended the long delay in allowing paramedics to enter the home, saying, “They still don’t know how many shooters are inside, how many guns are inside, and they still have to assume that they will be ambushed if they walk in this house.”

Yeah. I’m sure that defense would get you off if you spent an hour and a quarter watching a wounded cop bleed to death.

These days, our troops in Afghanistan are a lot more careful about avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties than the Pima County police.

When an American does get shot and killed in Afghanistan — like 23-year-old Lance Cpl. Peter Clore, leading a mine-clearing patrol with his combat dog, Duke, in the Helmand Province on May 28 — what do you think happens? Marines chase the shooters into a compound from which they can fire on our forces. So Marines finally call in an airstrike, and the airstrike ends up killing women and children behind whom the murderers were sheltering.
And you know what they do? Our guys apologize.

I don’t happen to think actual combat troops should have to apologize in a case like that. (I also don’t think our guys should be in Afghanistan, though I’m sure no one asked Lance Cpl. Clore.)

I do think someone should apologize for killing former Marine Jose Guerena in his own home, though, instead of trying to sully his reputation by talking about the pictures under his bed.

But unlike druggists and store owners who open fire on armed bandits (look up former Air Force Lt. Col. Jerome Ersland), those Tucson bumblers are never going to be sentenced to prison for “firing too many rounds,” are they?

Oh, the widow Guerena will get a settlement — of which those cops will pay not a penny. Jose Guerena’s neighbors, the taxpayers of the Tucson area, will pay every penny, as part of the cost of their ongoing occupation by a bunch of trigger-happy drug warriors dressed up like real G.I.s.

Watch the video. How do you think this gang is going to fare when guys with combat training finally get fed up enough to really start shooting back?