Content Warning: Self-Harm and Domestic Violence
Yesterday I wrote about the Portland Press Herald’s report on David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, and what we knew then was already bad. Brouillette is said to have a spotty work history, a string of jobs he couldn’t hold onto, and an ex-wife accusing him of trying to get her to lie for him after the shooting.
It turns out that was the shallow end of the details. The AP published its own investigation, and it’s a much longer, much darker document, built on interviews with multiple relatives, court records, and a voicemail that I genuinely wish I didn’t have to read.
Since we’re talking about it, let’s start with the voicemail. Last winter, Brouillette left his ex-wife Ashley a message mocking her for taking out a restraining order against him, calling her “disgusting,” and telling her that she and the other women in her family should have their throats cut.
He clarified, helpfully, that he wasn’t threatening to do it himself. He just thought they deserved it. You know, because that’s not legally considered a threat at all. He probably even thinks that if you ask a cop if they’re a cop, they’re legally required to tell you. Which is kind of ironic since he was hiding behind a mask when he shot and killed the father of a young girl.
Anyway, that’s not a guy having a bad day. That’s a man telling a woman, on a recorded message, that he believes she should die, and somehow that’s not even the only account of violence in this story.
Ashley also told the AP that early in their marriage, after she got pregnant with their daughter, he threw boiling water on her while she was holding the baby. Her mother backs up the story.
A second ex-wife filed years of protective orders on behalf of herself and his other daughter, describing him tackling that teenager and smearing spaghetti in her hair and dragging her around the house while she cried.
According to a relative who spoke to the AP anonymously, Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and ADD as a child, attempted suicide twice at age 12, and was hospitalized multiple times.
His oldest daughter, Madison, told the AP she came home from school one day to find her father sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head. Military recruiters initially rejected him over his psychiatric history, and according to that same relative, they told him to go off his medication for a year and reapply, which he did, and it worked.
I want to be careful here, because there shouldn’t be shame in struggling with your mental health, and plenty of people manage serious diagnoses and live full, safe lives without hurting anyone. I myself struggle with depression, anxiety, and ADHD.
But a documented history this severe, involving a suicide attempt with a gun and a lifetime of alleged violence against the women closest to him, is the kind of thing a background check and psychological screening are supposed to catch before someone gets handed a badge and a gun and sent out to patrol American streets. Obviously, it didn’t.
Which raises the obvious question. Is ICE actually running psychological evaluations on the people it’s hiring, or has the agency spent this year so focused on hitting quotas for Trump’s immigration crackdown that it stopped caring who’s holding the gun?
Because from where I’m sitting, it looks a lot less like careful vetting and a lot more like a warm-body hiring spree, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero is dead because of it.
(Source)
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