Posted on 03/13/2003 8:08:49 AM PST by wildbill
Slain girl's mom files $30 million lawsuit
Claiming federal agents had no reason to use deadly force against her daughter, the mother of a slain 14-year-old girl filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the two agents who she claims fired at Ashley Villarreal. The complaint seeks $30 million and potentially offers the most public review of the Feb. 9 encounter between the teenager and agents who were waiting to arrest her father, cocaine-trafficking suspect Joey Villarreal.
The case was filed in federal court a day after authorities asserted that Joey Villarreal knew about the stakeout and that his daughter was acting as a decoy when she drove along the street with her headlights off.
When investigators tried to stop her sedan, officials said, she rammed their unmarked vehicles and accelerated toward agents, who opened fire without being able to see who was at the wheel.
A lawyer for the girl's mother, Deborah De Luna Villarreal, dismissed this account as "the government laying out an alternate reality."
"I think there is a grave danger that reality is going to be distorted dramatically," said the attorney, Marynell Maloney. "How is a 14-year-old girl responsible to such a degree that she should be killed?"
The lawsuit is directed at two agents who, it asserts, are believed to have fired at the car: Bill Swierc and Jeff Kinnaman. The agents could not be reached for comment.
Authorities have not said who fired the fatal shot.
Maloney said a similar complaint against the agents' employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, is in the works. Lawyers for Joey Villarreal have indicated they are preparing their own civil suit.
Should the case go to trial, it would offer possibly the most public review of the shooting at the intersection of South San Joaquin and Motes streets.
While the DEA and the San Antonio Police Department are separately examining the incident, it is unclear whether their findings will be released in detail.
A DEA spokesman, noting that the reviews still are under way, said it would be inappropriate for the agency to comment on the lawsuit.
The narrative described in the lawsuit says Ashley believed the agents were gang members. It also faults investigators for not seeing the girl climb into the car, emphasizing that minutes earlier she and a friend had put garbage cans on the stoop.
"This is a girl who's carrying out the trash, standing out there in the streetlight, and they're shooting her dead moments later," Maloney said. "It doesn't add up."
Described by Maloney as traumatized and grieving, Ashley's mother wasn't at a news conference held at the lawyer's office Wednesday.
Maloney said that, while the lawsuit seeks $10 million in actual damages and $20 million in punitive damages, what Ashley's mom wants most is to prove that her daughter was a victim.
"The numbers are really difficult to determine. What is the worth of human life?" Maloney said. "The main point is this thing shouldn't have happened."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mrobbins@express-news.net
03/13/2003
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It was drug-pusher daddy's car. They didn't know it was a 14 year old girl in the driver's seat.
1) Your agreement with #17
2) Your assertion in #31 that "drugs" brought this "escalation"
3) Your statement in #31 that the "parents put her in harm's way, an implication that you believe the asinine "decoy" story.
4) Your sarcastic tone in your #34 to me.
No it wasn't, it was the passenger's car.
Correction: "Federal officials say..."
Add to that, it is amazing what people will say when they need to cover their backsides. And when there is seemingly no end to people willing to take what they say as incontrovertible fact simply because the people giving their account wear a uniform.
Cops should not be held above the law. If anything, they should be held to a higher standard.
Not a lower standard.
The wanna be drug pusher acting as a decoy for her drug pushing father got what she deserved/sarcasm
Side note: What exactly was she supposed to be a decoy for? How did her father even know undercover DEA agents were outside? Did he try to "flee" during the ordeal?
The DEA need better lies. They are getting more pathetic by the day.
My gun training was military, not police. The rules are the same (except for combat when you are under fire from a positively identified enemy.)
Do not discharge your firearm unless you can see the person you are shooting at, and recognize them as someone to be fired upon. Period.
You forget. The drug warriors believe that it's perfectly fine for innocents to get shot and killed, millions of dollars in property to be stolen from innocent persons, hundreds of doors of innocents to get kicked in at 3 am, hundreds of innocent folks to get slammed to the floor nude by Rambo wannabes - all these things are just fine as long as the holy WOsD continues.
They don't care.
It's unfortunate these things don't happen to them. Their opinion might change.
Oh, yeah, I guess it does, like the politician's kids who get off with a slap on the wrist, while other kids get long jail terms.
Justice, yeah, that's the ticket !
Do you believe that a 14 year old girl would be practicing driving with her uncle at night with no lights on?
Do you believe that a vehicle driven by a 14 year old is less dangerous than a vehicle driven by a 40 year old?
Do you believe that a person has the right of self-defense?
Do you believe that you should check the age of a person threatening your life before you take action to stop them from doing so?
I await your responses.
The parents *did* -- in fact -- put the little girl in harm's way.
Here's something more general, but should be easily understood:
Growing up, I was calling 911 or my mom, who worked nights, several times per week, because my step-father ended up passed out on the sofa, due to excessive drinking and pot smoking.
Why should an 11-year-old child have to deal with this, why mom is at work?
If you don't agree, I suppose you expected that I, as a fifth grader, should have been expected to call 911 up to five times a week -- for a grown man.
Should a step-father put this kind of strain/responsibility on a young child? My step-father was no father, due to his excessive drug use. Sorry....
That the WOD might include some occasional brutal consequences as this story illustrates seems almost a given. What remains uncertain is whether such efforts to implement prohibition II might someday rise to the level where outsiders may look upon our plight and conspire to liberate us from so many civil rights abuses in the form of regime change for our own good.
As a free society I think it best to put the dictatorial tendancies down and step back and away, rather than someday finding ourselves the target of some liberating faction hellbent on restoring our Bill of Rights.
There are even more of the drug lovers (who believe only some laws should be enforced) who will believe a drug dealing slimeball before they'll believe a cop.
Don't integrate it into the gun, integrate it into the uniform. It shouldn't be active only when a weapons clears the holster, it should be active while the officer is on duty. It'd be a win-win. Excessive force lawsuits against cops will likely drop when you've got video evidence (no more "incidents" for the 'race-baiting poverty pimps' to exploit for gain) and assure they're acquitted of false charges, and the rights of suspects are protected by the video evidence as well if the cops themselves violate the law, since it'll all be on record.
Technofixes aren't a total panacea, but I figure that if the government wants to keep us under surveillance, we should demand the same of them. The physical equipment required for basic A/V wouldn't be too hard (it'd have to be ruggedized, lightweight, low power, and the communications link robust enough to handle the data transmission). The legal framework for handling the data would have to be worked on (how it's stored, under what circumstances it'd be accessible, etc.) That way it makes it a bit easier to keep everyone honest.
Perhaps - but that really makes no difference. The car was pulling away from the curb at a high rate of spead, lights off, at night from in front of a known pushers' home.
It would be nice if every 14 year old girl would be as innocent as you seem to think they are.
L
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