Monday, March 26, 2007
A U.S. Border Patrol agent's account of what led him to shoot and kill an unarmed illegal entrant in January doesn't match witness testimony or forensic evidence, records released Monday by the Cochise County Attorney's office show.
The documents appear to support the claims of witnesses, including family members of Francisco Javier Dominguez-Rivera, 22, of Puebla, Mexico, who have said the agent already had a gun in his right hand when he drove up to them in a Border Patrol vehicle the afternoon of Jan. 12 about 150 yards north of the border between Bisbee and Douglas. The area is southeast of the Paul Spur Lime plant and Arizona 80 and is routinely used for smuggling of both people and drugs.
The witnesses said the agent ordered them to the ground and had switched the gun from his right to left hand as he physically pushed Dominguez-Rivera, to the ground. That is when they said the gun fired.
The agent, Nicholas Corbett, has not cooperated with investigators. However, he reportedly told colleagues on the day of the shooting that he was in pursuit of three members of a larger group of illegal border crossers and had moved to intercept them in his vehicle. He exited the vehicle with his gun drawn and spotted a man at the rear of his vehicle with a rock in his hand.
When the man made a motion as if he were about to throw the rock, Corbett said he raised his weapon and fired a single round.
The bullet that killed Dominguez-Rivera entered the left side of his chest, passed through his heart and liver and exited the abdomen a couple of inches to the right of Dominguez-Rivera's navel, according to an autopsy report by the Cochise County medical examiner's office that was released along with hundreds of other pages of documents related to the shooting investigation.
Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer said he has not yet decided whether the agent will face charges, noting that that decision will not be made until he's had a chance to review a video of the incident captured by a Border Patrol surveillance camera.
That videotape is in the hands of the FBI, he said, where it is undergoing "video enhancement."
Corbett has returned to active duty since the incident, Border Patrol officials said.