A quick correction before we get started. I’ve been calling the man ICE killed in Biddeford “Joan Sebastian Guerrero,” because that’s the name that showed up in the earliest reporting. However, his actual name is Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, and that’s what I’ll be using from here on out. He deserves to be remembered correctly.
Anyway, in my previous post, I wrote about how DHS was still in full stonewall mode. A Portland Press Herald reporter asked DHS spokesperson James Covington for the shooter’s name, and his entire response was, “I will never share an officer’s name.” I called it what it is, a secret police tactic that exists to protect agents from consequences rather than protect anyone’s safety.
Well, now we have a name, and DHS wasn’t the one who announced it. The aforementioned Portland Press Herald identified the shooter as 37-year-old David Michael Brouillette of Manchester, Maine. They got his name from his ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, plus a witness and three of his former coworkers, who all recognized him from footage of the scene.
Ashley told the paper that Brouillette called her and asked her to lie for him and vouch for his character. She refused. According to her, he insisted the shooting was justified because Durán Guerrero supposedly tried to hit him with the car, a claim she says the video doesn’t back up.
What stuck with her most, she said, was how calm he was about the whole thing. Not shaken, not horrified. Just calm, like a man describing a paperwork error rather than a killing. And this isn’t the first time Ashley Brouillette has raised concerns about him. She says she previously reported worries about his mental health and abusive behavior to his superiors while he was still in the military.
Once the name became public, ICE didn’t offer any real accountability, just a statement praising Brouillette’s “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training,” followed by an accusation that reporters were trying to “dox” their officer. Their statement claimed doxxing puts agents and their families “in serious danger” and blamed the coverage on the “malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians.”
Journalists confirming the identity of a government employee who killed someone in public, using witnesses and public records, is not doxxing. It’s called reporting, and it’s existed for about as long as government employees have been killing people in public. If ICE is worried about its agents facing scrutiny for shooting bystanders, the fix isn’t harassing journalists into silence. The fix is not shooting bystanders. Nobody would need to “dox” this man if his own employer had just told the truth about who he was the day it happened.
And here’s the thing about the guy DHS was so desperate to protect. His résumé reads like a warning label. Brouillette bounced between the Maine National Guard, the Army, a corrections job he resigned from after a year, a stint with Maine DHHS he also quit, a spell driving trucks, and a volunteer firefighter gig in Manchester that ended after he reportedly got into a shouting match with department leadership and refused orders. Court records show he told a judge he’d had to resign from truck driving over health concerns.
None of this screams stability, and none of it screams the kind of judgment you’d want from someone who’s handed a badge and a gun and sent out to do “targeted surveillance” on residential streets.
So that’s the snapshot we’ve got. A man whose own ex-wife flagged to the military as abusive and struggling with his mental health. Someone who couldn’t hold a job for more than a year or two at a stretch. A person who allegedly asked his ex to lie for him after killing someone and who came across as eerily unbothered while doing it.
This is the kind of person ICE is putting behind the wheel and handing a service weapon to. Abusive, remorseless, unstable assclowns who can’t hold down a job.
As someone who started all this once said, “They’re not sending their best.”
(Source)
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