(CNN) — A substance collected from the van in which Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Houston last week likely was salt, an attorney for the slain man’s brother said she believes, countering the FBI’s previous assertions that the substance could be drugs.
Thursday’s statement from attorney Ruby Powers came hours after the district attorney in Texas’ Harris County also said he believed the substance wasn’t drugs. And even if it was, the prosecutor said, it should have no bearing on investigations into whether the killing of 52-year-old Salgado Araujo during an attempted traffic stop on July 7 was justified, or whether the stop of the Mexican immigrant and his three passengers was warranted.
This comes days after the FBI filed a warrant application saying the agency has cause to believe that an investigator — after the shooting — found illegal drugs in the vehicle longtime Texas resident Salgado Araujo had been driving.
“After consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this (substance) was granulated salt,” Powers, an attorney for Salgado Araujo’s brother Victor Salgado, one of the three passengers, said in a release. Such salt “is paired with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix used by outdoor workers in extreme Texas heat,” she said.
Citing what he’s learned about Salgado Araujo and the three men in the van, District Attorney Sean Teare reiterated Friday he doesn’t believe the substance was drugs.
Salgado Araujo’s wife prepared the homemade electrolyte mixes for his work crew every morning, Teare told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Friday. “This is something they’ve been doing for years, which is consistent with where the baggies were found,” he said.
The toxicology results testing the substance are expected late Friday or Monday, according to Powers. Teare gave the same timeline.
The FBI previously declined to comment on what Powers and Teare said.
Teare also stressed it had been 11 days since Salgado Araujo’s killing and local law enforcement still didn’t know the identity of the federal agent who shot him.
Federal authorities’ account of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s fatal shooting — that an agent fired a gun in self-defense as Salgado Araujo maneuvered the vehicle — has faced scrutiny. The officers involved were not wearing body-worn cameras.
Salgado Araujo was one of two people fatally shot this month by federal officers during immigration enforcement operations. The shootings in Houston and Maine reignited criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics.
FBI’s drug claim came in court document
A week after the shooting, the FBI filed a warrant application saying it has cause to believe illegal drugs were in the vehicle Salgado Araujo was driving.
The application cites probable cause for “distribution, manufacturing, or possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance and simple possession of a controlled substance.”
In the warrant affidavit authored by FBI Special Agent David McNielly on Tuesday and submitted to a federal magistrate judge, the agent described arriving on scene after the shooting and allegedly observing small plastic bags “with a white crystal-like substance” in the white cargo van. McNielly said he made the observations from outside of the van.
“The packaging and appearance of the controlled substance in the target vehicle is consistent with methamphetamine,” the warrant states. However, it does not explicitly say who the bags are believed to belong to. Included within the warrant are two images of the bags that appear to be on the vehicle’s dashboard. CNN has reached out to the FBI about whether the contents of the bags have been confirmed or sent for screening.
The warrant was served Wednesday, and members of Teare’s office observed while the evidence was collected from the vehicle, Teare said. FBI agents were involved in Wednesday’s vehicle search, Houston Mayor John Whitmire told CNN.
Federal and state officials are investigating shooting
ICE said Salgado Arajuo, who was driving with three members of his construction crew – including his brother – on their way to work, was shot around 7 a.m. July 7 after he tried to evade arrest as agents tried to stop the vehicle during a “targeted enforcement operation.”
The agency did not specify whether Salgado Arajuo was the intended target, but a source with preliminary details about the incident said he was not.
Shortly before the shooting, agents were trying to investigate two Guatemalan men known to be driving a white van who had previously evaded arrest and were potentially subject to deportation, the US attorney for Texas’s southern district said Thursday.
While the agents searched for that van on the morning of July 7, officers received a report of a similar van in the area that then fled as the officers tried to pull it over, the US attorney, Aaron Reitz, said.
The officers didn’t pursue the van during that initial encounter. But the officers saw what they say is the same van again later that morning, “and this time the agents successfully surrounded the vehicle,” Reitz said.
During the stop of the van — containing Salgado Araujo and his three passengers — two of the four officers got out of their vehicles and told the driver to put the van in park, Reitz said, citing what he said was preliminary information given to his office.
But the driver, Reitz said, shifted the van “into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it.” One of the officers fired a single shot at Salgado Araujo at some point in the confrontation, Reitz said. The other federal officers immediately gave first aid to Salgado Araujo, who was then taken to a hospital, where he died, Reitz said.
Reitz also said officers then saw small bags of a white, crystal-like substance inside the van, which prompted the search warrant.
The warrant filed by McNielly, the FBI special agent, also said the van Salgado Araujo was driving when he was shot had previously attempted to flee federal agents earlier that morning.
The van was registered to Salgado Araujo, who agents determined to be in the country illegally, a source with preliminary details about the incident told CNN.
CNN has contacted DHS and the family’s attorney for comment on the US attorney’s statement.
ICE initially said Salgado Araujo “rammed into an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer,” leading to “our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
Reitz’s statement Thursday does not mention vehicle ramming.
Men who were in Salgado Araujo’s work van say ICE’s version of events was false, attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra and US Rep. Sylvia Garcia said. Two of the men told Garcia the agents’ vehicles bumped into them and then swayed into the van, forcing them to stop.
The agents never identified themselves to the men, they told Garcia.
The men told Garcia agents had exited their vehicles and run toward the van, she told CNN. They pulled out the passengers as one of the agents fired one shot at Salgado Araujo, she said they told her.
It wasn’t clear to Salgado Araujo’s brother they were ICE agents until after the shot was fired and he saw the word “ICE” on the lanyard of the agent pulling him out of the vehicle, Powers told CNN on Friday.
The three passengers were detained, according to his family. Details on whether any of the three were intended targets of the traffic stop, and exact details about their immigration status, weren’t immediately available.
But Teare’s office certified requests for U visas for the three. Such visas allow foreign nationals without any official status in the US to stay in the country in certain circumstances when they’re witnesses to alleged crimes. The office regularly certifies U visa requests for material witnesses, a spokesperson with Teare’s office told CNN on Wednesday.
Powers is calling for her client to be released so he can grieve with his family and provide testimony about what he witnessed the day his brother was fatally shot.
The assistant district attorney visited Salgado Arajuo’s brother last week, but he hasn’t been interviewed since, she told CNN on Friday.
The DHS Office of the Inspector General is leading an investigation into the shooting, according to ICE. And the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Texas Rangers said Wednesday it would investigate the shooting alongside the OIG and the FBI, and that it “will have access to all available evidence” collected by the federal agencies.
The ACLU of Texas, which is working closely with Salgado Araujo’s family, said, “The Trump administration lacks credibility to investigate itself, and we should be skeptical of any claims until a full independent investigation is complete.”
The Harris County district attorney’s office is pursuing its own investigation, “looking directly at the actions of that agent, and when we get to the end … we will make a charging decision,” Teare said Thursday.
Salgado Araujo was living in the US without legal permission, ICE said. He had lived in the US for nearly 35 years, raising three sons with his wife and building homes in the Houston suburbs, one of his sons told reporters. He submitted an application for a work permit and was “close to obtaining his legal status,” the son said.
DA questions warrant’s unsealing
Teare, the district attorney, said Thursday he was concerned about the motives for the warrant’s unsealing. While not unheard of, it is unusual for an FBI search warrant to be publicly available during an active and high-profile investigation of this nature.
The federal court docket appears to show the warrant was initially sealed when it was filed Tuesday, shielding its contents from public view, but it was later unsealed. The filing came two days before a public viewing for Salgado Araujo, and three days before his funeral.
Law enforcement had not searched the vehicle prior to filing the warrant, McNielly wrote.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office was allowed to be present during the search warrant execution, but Teare said local law enforcement hasn’t been able to “forensically download” the van, which is a more critical piece of information.
Teare said the investigators conducting the search warrant appeared focused on retrieving the baggies from the van, adding they didn’t ask to get the vehicle’s crash recorder data, which “would have shown steering input, speed, braking for up to 15 seconds before the incident,” and didn’t ask to test the van for DNA to confirm who had touched the outside.
CNN has reached out to the FBI and US Attorney’s Office about Teare’s comments on the search warrant.
To date, the Department Homeland Security has not indicated that the ICE agents who stopped Salgado Araujo had any knowledge of drugs possibly being inside the vehicle at the time of the fatal shooting.
“A search warrant does not equate to guilt. An unidentified substance is not a confirmed narcotic. We are requesting that the substance testing be expedited so that their names can be cleared. But no test result, whatever it ultimately shows, will change the fact that deadly force was used against Lorenzo. You cannot shoot first and ask questions later,” Powers said.
The medical examiner ruled that Salgado Araujo’s death was caused by a gunshot to the torso, and officials have not released toxicology information describing any substances in his system at the time of death.
Teare is concerned “that the federal government is going to try to use the fact that they believe narcotics … was present in the car to try to remove (the passengers in Salgado Araujo’s van) from the country, which is one of the reasons that we’ve already certified that all three of those individuals are material witnesses in a death investigation,” Teare said Thursday.
While the FBI has been “forthcoming and collaborative” with local law enforcement, DHS has been a “black box,” Teare said Friday.
But with or without their cooperation, Teare said: “At the end of this, we’re going to be able to present this case to a grand jury and see what criminal charges are appropriate.”
CNN has asked the Department of Justice for comment on the allegations in the warrant, why the warrant information was made public, and whether it was unsealed at the request of federal prosecutors. CNN has not yet received a response.
The president of the LULAC Adelante PAC, a political group that supports Latino voter participation and candidates, accused federal investigators of trying to “change the public discourse and prejudice a jury in Harris County.”
“It just smells of a smear campaign and a cover up,” Domingo Garcia said Wednesday.
CNN’s Josh Campbell, Holmes Lybrand, Ashley Killough and Emma Tucker contributed to this report.
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