A rookie agent named Oscar Juarez was patrolling the levee by the river when he heard Compean’s radio transmission. Though he was busy pushing back a large group that had gathered on the opposite side of the river, he was eager to get a drug bust under his belt, and he drove off to look for the van. He caught up with the Ford Econoline just as it reached town and fell in behind it, switching on his overhead lights. But instead of pulling over, the van suddenly turned around and headed south. Ramos, who had interrupted his lunch at the station to join the pursuit, took the lead. “It’s close,” Juarez radioed as they moved in, speeding down farm roads to the river. “We’ve got this baby.”
As they approached the Rio Grande, the pavement yielded to dirt, dead-ending at a drainage canal that agents affectionately call Shit Ditch. The driver, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, jumped out of his van as Ramos and Juarez closed in on him. Compean, who had followed the progress of the chase over the radio, was waiting on the south side of the ditch, blocking Aldrete-Davila’s path back to Mexico. As Aldrete-Davila dashed through the sewage water away from his pursuers, Compean pointed his shotgun at the tall, gangly 24-year-old and ordered him to stop. (According to Aldrete-Davila, the agent said, “¡Párate, mexicano de mierda!” or “Stop, you Mexican shit!”) He raised his hands, which were empty.
Then Aldrete-Davila and Compean both heard another agent yell, “Hit him!” (Ramos and Juarez, the only other people at the scene, would later deny having said this.)
“Take it easy, man,” Aldrete-Davila implored, hands still in the air. “Take it easy. No me pegues.” (“Don’t hit me.”)
Compean would later testify that he had tried to use the butt of his shotgun to push Aldrete-Davila back. (“He put his hands up, but to me, it looked like he was coming at me,” Compean said on the stand.) Whatever his intentions, he swung the butt of his shotgun at Aldrete-Davila, who dodged it. The agent lost his footing and fell face-first into the ditch, dropping his weapon.
Seeing his opening, Aldrete-Davila bolted toward the river, a little more than a hundred yards away. (Compean later claimed to have climbed out of the ditch and tackled him before he broke free again, although no other witness corroborated that account.) As Aldrete-Davila sprinted across the last stretch of American soil, Compean, who had never fired his gun in the line of duty, pulled out his .40-caliber pistol and started shooting. When he missed, he reloaded and tried again, firing a total of fourteen times. Aldrete-Davila kept running, and as he approached the river’s edge, Ramos—who had crossed the ditch to come to his colleague’s aid—fired his first and only shot. The force of the bullet, which entered Aldrete-Davila’s left buttock, knocked him to the ground.
Aldrete-Davila lay on the riverbank, bleeding. He waited for a moment, thinking the two agents were going to arrest him. When he realized that they were not coming, he stood up and limped through the ankle-deep water back to Mexico. Ramos and Compean holstered their weapons and walked away.
Border Patrol agents had begun arriving, gathering near the abandoned Econoline. They included field operations supervisor Jonathan Richards, the most senior agent at the scene, who had grown concerned about the lack of radio communication and had left the station to check on the pursuit. Ramos eventually joined the group, breathing hard, and got ribbed by the other agents for being out of shape. They would later remember that he had seemed agitated. “Hey, Nacho, settle down,” joked Richards. “You’re acting like this is your first load.”
“It’s been a long time,” Ramos said. “I’m fine. It’s just the adrenaline.”
Ramos knew the protocol: A Border Patrol agent who fires his weapon is required to inform a supervisor within an hour. (Border Patrol agents are trained to shoot to kill, not to maim.) Yet as he talked to Richards, he never mentioned that he and Compean had just shot at a suspect fifteen times. Ramos said only that Compean had fallen while he was trying to apprehend the van’s driver and had gotten dirt thrown in his eyes. Richards called out to Compean, who was standing at a distance on the levee, and asked if he was all right. The agent assured him that he was, except for a few cuts on his hand and face, and said nothing about the shooting. Before leaving the area, Compean stooped down to pick up nine of his spent shell casings and tossed them in the ditch.
On his way to the station to write his report, Compean stopped to talk to Arturo Vasquez, a more junior agent, who asked what had happened. “That little bitch took me to the ground and threw dirt on my face,” Vasquez recalled Compean saying. Providing no further explanation, Compean added: “I had to fire some rounds.” He asked Vasquez, who was headed back to the levee, to look for the five remaining spent shell casings—which Compean had been unable to find—since he needed to return to the station. Vasquez knew that the scene of a shooting was supposed to be left undisturbed for the Sector Evidence Team, but in deference to his superior, he agreed.
Back at the station Compean washed up and ran into Richards as he was coming out of the restroom. He had a cut on his hand that had drawn blood. Richards asked him if he had been assaulted by the driver, and Compean denied that he had. “No, I’m okay. Nothing happened,” the agent said. “I just hurt my hand when I fell down, that’s all.”
The van turned out to contain an impressive cache: Nine burlap sacks stacked in the back held a total of 743 pounds of marijuana, estimated by the DEA to be worth $594,400. (Loads that size were not unusual; from January of the previous year through mid-March of 2005, agents at the Fabens station made 155 narcotics seizures, netting a total of 43,703 pounds of marijuana and a small amount of cocaine.) On paper, the day had been an unmitigated success for Ramos and Compean. The seizure report, which Compean had written that afternoon, made no mention of the agents’ having fired their weapons. In fact the two-page document devoted just one sentence to the entire chain of events that had transpired from the time that Aldrete-Davila had failed to pull over to the moment that he had fled home across the Rio Grande. It read, simply: “The driver was able to abscond back to Mexico.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, a Border Patrol agent stationed in Willcox, Arizona, told his supervisor that he had learned of an unreported shooting outside El Paso in which agents were said to have fired at an unarmed Mexican national. He had heard about the incident from his mother-in-law, who knew the victim’s mother. The Department of Homeland Security’s oversight branch, the Office of Inspector General, launched a criminal investigation the next day and assigned Special Agent Christopher Sanchez to the case. The ex-Marine was given few facts to work with other than the date and general location of the shooting, but recordings of the day’s radio traffic led him to Oscar Juarez. He divulged that Ramos and Compean had pursued a man to the river on the afternoon in question, though otherwise he remained tight-lipped. He never mentioned seeing the altercation by the ditch or the fact that he had witnessed the shooting while standing by the van. (“I didn’t want to be the snitch,” Juarez later testified.)
A break in the investigation came on March 11, when Sanchez reached Aldrete-Davila by phone and discovered that the most significant piece of evidence in the case—the bullet that had struck him—was still intact. Aldrete-Davila did not have the money to have it removed, and he had endured the previous three weeks with the bullet still lodged in his groin. His urethra had been severed, and only a crude rubber tube, which connected his bladder to a plastic bag, allowed him to urinate. Sanchez explained that the bullet itself could make the case; ballistics testing could possibly pinpoint which agent’s weapon had fired it once the slug was removed and entered into evidence. But Aldrete-Davila refused to come to El Paso to have the operation performed, convinced that it was a ruse to lure him across the border so that authorities could arrest him. He would cooperate with the investigation, he said, only if he were given a written guarantee that he would not be prosecuted.
This left the U.S. attorney’s office with two bad options: grant immunity to a drug smuggler, or allow Border Patrol agents who had shot at a man while he was running away and
then concealed their conduct to go unpunished. Although Aldrete-Davila admitted to driving the load of marijuana, federal prosecutors did not think they had a viable case against him. No evidence tied him to the crime, and his phone conversation with Sanchez would not have been admissible at trial. Without a suspect in custody, the case had never been treated as an active investigation; the van had not initially been analyzed for fingerprints, and the marijuana had been destroyed. Any case brought against him—if he could be extradited from Mexico—would have to rely on the testimony of the two agents, who the prosecution’s own evidence showed were hardly credible witnesses. So on March 16, Sanchez presented paperwork to Aldrete-Davila at the American consulate in Juárez, granting him immunity to testify about his actions on the day of the shooting. (“When you cast a play in hell, you don’t get angels as witnesses,” assistant U.S. attorney Debra Kanof later warned the jury.)
The bullet was removed by Army doctors at Fort Bliss, and ballistics tests showed that it had been fired from Ramos’s handgun, which investigators had taken under the guise of performing a firearms audit. That night, federal agents arrested Ramos and Compean at their homes on assault charges.
Not until his arrest, a month after the shooting, did Compean claim that Aldrete-Davila had had a gun. He had never mentioned the weapon before—not when he stopped to talk to Vasquez about his missing shell casings and not when he confided in another agent, David Jacquez, that he had fired at the van’s driver. Yet when he sat down to talk to investigators, he said that he had acted in self-defense. (Ramos requested a lawyer and invoked his right to remain silent.) “We tumbled and wrestled for a little bit,” Compean wrote in a sworn statement. “I got some dirt in my eyes and he got up and started running back south towards Mexico. When he was running south he was pointing something shiny with his left hand. It looked like a gun. This is when I started shooting.” He had suspected that the driver had been injured: “Nacho might have hit him…When we saw him climbing out of the river on the Mexican side, the alien looked like he was limping.” But he had not reported the shooting, he wrote, because he was afraid he “was going to get in trouble.” Before signing the statement, he added that he was unsure if the driver had actually been armed: “My intent was to kill the alien because I thought he had a gun, but I never really saw for certain that he had a gun.”
The national media had not yet caught wind of the case when it went to trial in February 2006, and except for a few local reporters and relatives, it was sparsely attended. Around the federal courthouse in El Paso, it was jokingly referred to as “the case of las comadres” (“the case of the girlfriends”), since the shooting had become public knowledge only by virtue of a phone call between two female friends. Ramos and Compean were tried together; both agents would assert that Aldrete-Davila had turned and pointed a shiny object at them as he ran to the river. But from the start, the prosecution chipped away at the idea that either defendant had actually seen a gun or feared for his life. Three agents—Juarez, Vasquez, and Jacquez—accepted proffer letters, which shielded them from prosecution, in exchange for their testimony. The trial revealed that the defendants had not tried to take cover during the shooting or warned other agents who arrived at the scene afterward not to stand out in the open. Luis Barker, the former chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, described a meeting with Compean in which he had protested his suspension after his arrest; the agent had given a detailed account of the shooting but never mentioned a gun. And while the defense’s theory rested on the notion that Aldrete-Davila had been pointing something shiny with his left hand, as both agents claimed, prosecutors showed that he was right-handed.
On the stand, Compean tried to disavow the most damaging parts of the sworn statement he had made after his arrest. He had never thought that Ramos’s bullet had struck Aldrete-Davila—“That’s not what I meant to put down,” he said—and he had never asked Vasquez to pick up his spent shell casings. (“It was two o’clock, one-thirty, in the morning” when he wrote his statement, he told the jury.) Even harder to explain was why he and Ramos had failed to report the shooting, if not for the simple reason that they felt they had something to hide. Both were experienced agents who were well versed in Border Patrol policy; Compean was a field training officer who had schooled Fabens’s greener agents, and Ramos, a former firearms instructor, was a member of the Sector Evidence Team, which examined crime scenes so that investigators could determine whether agents had been justified in firing their weapons. Yet Ramos testified that he had not informed his superiors about the incident because he “assumed it had been reported by somebody.” (He could not explain why, then, supervisors had never pressed him for further details or called the Sector Evidence Team.) Compean claimed that he had not reported the shooting because he did not think he would be believed. He had retrieved his spent shell casings for “no reason,” he said, adding, “I just wasn’t thinking. I just—I just saw them there, and I picked them up.”
Defense attorneys argued that these were administrative violations that did not amount to criminal behavior and tried to persuade the jury that Aldrete-Davila had been armed. As they saw it, the entry point of the bullet on the left side of his buttock proved that he had been turned at an angle—as if he were extending his arm back to point a weapon—when he was shot. The orthopedic surgeon who had removed the bullet would say only that he could not rule out the possibility. The defense had less success reconciling the contradictions in the agents’ testimony. Ramos claimed that he had heard gunfire while crossing the ditch and then found Compean lying on the ground as if wounded—a scenario that, if true, helped justify his shooting at the fleeing suspect. But Compean testified that he had stood up from a kneeling position after firing his gun, not fallen flat on his back. In closing arguments, Ramos’s attorney, Mary Stillinger, tried to establish reasonable doubt by emphasizing that Aldrete-Davila was “the only government witness that can testify that he did not have a gun.” (Oscar Juarez had not been able to see past the levee, where Aldrete-Davila was shot, to know if he had pulled a weapon.) “Everything depends on the credibility of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila,” Stillinger said. “Are you going to believe the admitted drug trafficker, or are you going to believe the agents?”
In the end, the case came down to the credibility of Ramos and Compean, whom the jury decided to convict on five out of six charges, rejecting only the most serious one: assault with intent to commit murder. On October 19, 2006, U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone sentenced them to eleven and twelve years, respectively. Strict sentencing guidelines left her little latitude since one charge—discharge of a firearm in commission of a crime of violence—carried a mandatory ten-year term. The jury hadn’t known the penalties for each charge when it rendered its verdict, and three jurors would later sign affidavits for the defense saying that they had been pressured to vote with the majority at the end of the two-and-a-half-week-long trial; they had been holdouts to acquit on the assault and civil rights charges, though not on obstruction of justice. (The U.S. attorney’s office later issued a statement that read, “The jurors were polled in open court immediately after announcing their verdicts and all said without hesitation or equivocation that the verdicts were theirs.”) Prosecutors had offered plea deals to the defendants before trial, including an 18-month term for Ramos and 21 months for Compean, if they would plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges. It was a package deal that both men had to take and which they had declined. “It was simply the principle of the whole thing,” Ramos wrote to me. “I could have never lived that down.” (Compean, as well as Aldrete-Davila, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Ramos’s wife, Monica, put it more bluntly: “My husband was facing forty years, and they offered him eighteen months. Wouldn’t a guilty person take that?”
A female juror, who agreed to talk to me on condition of anonymity saw things differently. “We didn’t believe they had acted in self-defense,” she said. “I think Compean got mad and started shooting.” A
s for Ramos: “He was a marksman, and I think he knew he hit the alien. That’s why he only fired once.” During deliberations, she said, the jury had weighed the fact that the victim had been transporting a large load of marijuana. “We agreed that we weren’t trying the alien for what he did,” she recalled. “That wasn’t the case we were given.”
TWO MONTHS BEFORE Ramos and Compean were set to be sentenced, Lou Dobbs introduced the case to a national audience. “Tonight, two Border Patrol agents face twenty-year prison sentences,” he began. “They were prosecuted after pursuing a Mexican citizen illegally in the United States who tried to smuggle hundreds of pounds of drugs into this country. The drug smuggler has been given immunity…and guess who’s in jail?” Correspondent Casey Wian walked through the incident with Ramos, who recounted his version of events: hearing gunfire, finding his fellow agent lying on the ground, and then firing his weapon when the suspect pointed what appeared to be a gun. “[The public] entrusted me to stop a drug smuggler and I did,” he said. CNN’s viewers were never told that Ramos had failed to report the shooting, that Compean had tampered with key evidence, or that Aldrete-Davila had attempted to surrender—facts that were readily available to anyone who had read the indictment or newspaper coverage of the case. At the end of his report, an indignant Dobbs weighed in. “There should be an investigation of the U.S. attorney’s office who would even suggest that…an illegal alien drug smuggler caught with the goods has rights superior to those of the agents that we depend on to enforce the law,” he said. He promised his audience of nearly 900,000 viewers that “this broadcast will be following their story each and every day, and every step of the way, and we will be reporting to you on what in the world this government of ours is thinking.”
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 11