Update On José Guerena Case

It’s been almost seven months since the death of Jose Guerena Ortiz, the Iraq War veteran who was shot and killed inside his Arizona home by the Pima County SWAT unit, and questions surrounding the May 5th incident remain unanswered.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department maintains its position that the raid on Guerena’s home and his killing were both justified, provided that they suspected him of having ties to drug rings and that he showed up to the door brandishing a weapon.

Friends and fellow Marines continue to defend Guerena, claiming that the father and former copper-mine worker’s murder was an injustice and are demanding further investigation, according to The Huffington Post, while a family lawyer recently filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office for $20 million.

Reports have shown that Guerena was shot at 71 times and hit 22 times, causing Guereno family’s lawyer, Christopher Scileppi to call the SWAT team “poorly trained” and “overly excited”, as cited in the Huffington Post, as the sheriff’s chief of investigations Rick Kastigar continues to defend the officers even after it was shown that the ex-marine never fired a single bullet.

Although the Arizona Daily Star reports that “[t]he lead detective in the investigation wrote that during the six months of constant surveillance, none of the suspects was seen handling or even in the proximity of narcotics,” no arrests have been made since the killing and “no changes have been made to the policy and procedures of how SWAT operates”.