At 7:17 a.m. ET on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, a home security camera captured the sound of five gunshots when 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national, was fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer while in a white sedan.
A photo showed multiple bullet holes in the windshield of the car that was being driven by Guerrero when he was shot.
Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Seconds later, at 7:18 a.m., another surveillance video showed the sedan slowing down. In the video, ICE agents approached the car on both sides as it began to turn in circles for about a minute.
More than a minute later, at 7:19 a.m., the video shows an agent in a white SUV pinning Guerrero’s car, and the wounded man is then pulled out onto the pavement.
“I heard him say, ‘I tried to stop.’ I know that he was still cognizant because they told him to calm down,” witness Daniel Boucher, who heard the gunshots and saw the aftermath, told CBS News.
Boucher said it is a moment he’ll never forget.
“It’s something that’s horrific,” Boucher said. “You never forget that. You never forget the attitude of the ICE officers, too. And the ICE officer that shot him was in shock.”
Doorbell video showed first responders treating Guerrero. But the married father, who had a young daughter and worked as a delivery driver, died at the scene.
According to a statement from DHS, ICE agents were in the area “conducting targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal.”
Law enforcement sources told CBS News that Guerrero was not the target of ICE’s surveillance. And in an interview with CBS News Monday, Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine said she had “heard on good authority, though it’s not been confirmed by [DHS], that they perhaps shot the wrong person, that it was not the person they were going after.”
DHS maintains that when ICE agents approached Guerrero, he got in his car and “attempted to flee the scene.” DHS said that while “fearing for public safety,” an ICE officer “discharged his weapon.”
On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man with no criminal record, was fatally shot by an ICE officer while driving a work crew to a construction site in Houston, Texas. In that case, DHS admitted that Salgado Araujo was also not the target of ICE’s operation at the time of his shooting death.
Multiple law enforcement sources told CBS News Tuesday that federal officials are suspending most vehicle stops during immigration enforcement operations nationwide. Sources said the directive applies to ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, which primarily handles civil immigration arrests, and not Homeland Security Investigations, which handles criminal cases.
White House border czar Tom Homan later told reporters the decision to halt the stops was not a policy change.
“They believe it is a necessary short-term pause just to look at it and make sure everything’s good,” Homan said.
“It would be wise for DHS to have a halt in non-urgent traffic stops until we get this straightened out,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Tuesday. “We still are waiting the facts of this investigation. We don’t know exactly what happened.”
