Follow-up on Border Patrol Shooting Incident

From the Arizona Daily Star:

A U.S. Border Patrol agent who fatally shot an illegal entrant in January near Douglas could find out whether he'll face criminal charges within two weeks.

Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer said he won't wait much longer to review an enhanced version of a distant video of the incident from a Border Patrol surveillance camera that was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[snip]

More than 300 pages of documents released March 26 by the Cochise County Attorney's Office revealed that Corbett's account of what led him to shoot and kill the unarmed Domínguez-Rivera didn't match witness testimony or forensic evidence.

linkage (emphasis mine)

Will keep you posted on this. In a previous entry, Anatomy of an International Incident, I described how the pressure along the U.S./Mexico border builds to a crescendo and eventually pops like a bloody zit. This shooting was one of those ruptures and, thankfully, there is plenty of video and forensic evidence available to move it beyond a "He Said, They Said" type situation.

That is the only reason that justice is being done; otherwise the Dominguez-Rivera family would have been dismissed to the bureaucratic shadow that perpetually engulfs the way border policy is carried out by the Department of Homeland (in)Security. Take this late 2005 incident, for example:

Sometimes, border crossers die at the hands of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "We've had at least five officer-involved shootings here in recent months," said Rios. "In one case in December, a migrant climbed the fence and was shot. He made it to a hospital in Tijuana, where he died. The Border Patrol said he was trying to throw a rock at the agent, but the autopsy showed he was shot in the back."

linkage (emphasis mine)