Austin,
Texas
Drug
Raid
Tragedy
Leads
to
Another
12/28/01
Travis County Sheriff's Deputy Keith Ruiz died in a botched drug raid in February. Antonio Martinez, a 19-year-old civilian, died in a botched drug raid last week. Although months apart, the two deaths are eerily linked through the inexorable logic of a militarized war by state and federal authorities against their own citizens. On Thursday, December 20, a Travis County Sheriff's SWAT team accompanied by members of the Capital Area Drug Task Force burst into a mobile home in Del Valle, a largely Hispanic neighborhood on Austin's far east side, to execute a narcotics warrant. Within minutes, Martinez was dead, shot by a so-far unnamed deputy. Martinez was not the target of the raid and was not armed, but happened to be spending the night on the trailer's couch. The deputy may be unnamed, but he has been identified as having accompanied murdered Deputy Ruiz during a similar drug raid in which Ruiz lost his life. It now appears that a deputy traumatized by the death of his partner in a paramilitary-style drug raid responded with lethal force to a sudden movement by a startled Martinez, allowing an earlier preventable tragedy to lead to the most recent one. "To me, it was either an accident or a situation where the officer felt he was in danger," Travis County Sheriff Margo Frasier told the Austin American-Statesman. "I'm not sure which it was. At this point, there is a possibility that a mistake was made." The killing of an innocent person wasn't the only mistake, according to the American-Statesman. According to warrants filed by sheriff's deputies, the house to be raided was supposed to be full of automatic weapons, as well as cocaine and methamphetamines, but no weapons of any sort were found, only a single bullet. The deaths of Ruiz and Martinez have led at least one police watchdog group calling for an end to paramilitarized night-time drug raids on homes. "It doesn't make sense that law enforcement can't make the drug case unless they find the person at the home with the drugs at the moment," said Ann de Llano, spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union's Texas Police Accountability Project. "They can arrest the person and then execute a search warrant in a safe circumstance, while the person is not barred up in his home ready to shoot," she told the American-Statesman. "The sad part is you're not only risking the citizen's life but the officer's life, too. We don't need any more dead officers in Austin." Local law enforcement officials continued to defend the raids, however. "We'd love to call them [drug suspects] up and say 'C'mon down here and bring your dope,'" Travis County sheriff's spokesman Roger Wade told the American-Statesman. "But that's not realistic or logical. We need to keep doing what we're doing." Here's what they were doing: Twelve SWAT officers gathered in the pre-dawn hours and set off a flash bomb as a distraction in the yard of the trailer occupied by three adults and four children. Then deputies used a battering ram to burst through the trailer's door, and nine deputies burst into the residence yelling that they were police with a warrant. As one of the deputies headed toward the master bedroom, where police believed the drugs and guns were kept, he encountered Martinez sleeping on a couch. "He was asleep on the couch and raised up," explained Sheriff Frasier. The deputy fired once, hitting Martinez in the chest. But according to the American-Statesman's account, deputies let Martinez lie there bleeding while they rounded up the rest of the trailer's frightened residents. "Once the home was secured," wrote the Austin newspaper, "Martinez was given immediate attention and airlifted to an emergency room." He was dead before the helicopter landed. Deputies found 540 grams of cocaine and 222 grams of methamphetamine, Frasier said.
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