Neither Man Was the Target

What we're saying when we say the officers were looking for somebody else

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero.

I can’t get their names out of my head.

I had another article all ready to go earlier this morning. But I found myself repeatedly returning to the grief I feel that we live in a country that allows this kind of bigotry to exist, let alone carry and use weapons.

Pretty much all I’ve got right now is the names of two men, and what’s left of my composure.

Lorenzo left for work at sunrise. Thirty-plus years in this country. He built houses in the Houston suburbs and started his own business. He had three sons: a teacher, an engineer, and another one still studying engineering. What he didn’t have was a criminal record. His family says he was nearly done with the interminable process of getting legal status. (That is, he was going about the immigration process “the right way.”)

His son says he liked to pet his dog and sit on the porch and listen to music.

Tuesday morning, last week, he was driving his crew to a job site when unmarked cars started following the van. His son thinks Lorenzo may have believed the men were coming to steal his tools. That can happen to a guy with a van full of tools.

Witnesses say an agent approached the passenger side and fired almost immediately.

Turns out, the officers were looking for a different man at a different address. But. they saw a white van with a Brown guy inside who “resembled him.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Joan Sebastian was twenty-five, from Bucaramanga, in Colombia. He had two jobs. Some days his three-year-old daughter rode along. He had work authorization and a Social Security number.

Shortly before his death, he posted photographs celebrating his daughter’s third birthday. “I love you, my beautiful princess,” he wrote.

Monday morning, his white sedan slowly circled an intersection in Biddeford, Maine. An unmarked vehicle blocked his path. Photographs from the scene appeared to show at least four bullet holes in the windshield. A witness said the young father was bleeding badly from the head but still talking. He said he’d tried to stop.

A neighbor heard a woman screaming at the agents. “You took her dad. You took her dad.” She was holding the hand of a little girl in blue pajamas.

Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero wasn’t the subject of the warrant either.

“Neither man was the target.”

See, that’s the phrase that gets stuck sideways in my throat going down. It even resembles passive construction. (”Mistakes were made.”) Like a malfunction an inspector general could, if we still had them, investigate.

But listen to what that phrase assumes: There’s a right man, that somewhere out there is the person they meant to find at 6:50 in the morning, and that if they’d found him instead, the morning would’ve gone fine.

They’d have shot and killed the right guy, and that would have been acceptable?

Mistakes were made. It feels like a verbal shrug. What’re you gonna do?

The problem is that we built a thing whose ordinary operating conditions include armed men in unmarked vehicles boxing in a stranger’s car at dawn.

People flee because they’ve learned that stopping isn’t safe. We taught them that. We gave extensive training to people on why not automatically trusting folks who claim to be law enforcement is a pedagogical necessity in our culture.

By yesterday, the uproar was loud enough that the administration paused most vehicle stops. Mostly, I think, because the video was bad political theater, rather than because somebody had a come-to-Jesus moment. But maybe I’m just being overly cynical.

Whatever stopped the operation held until this morning, when the president said traffic stops are too important to give up and told the agents to keep the stat records coming.

The stat records. That’s what’s driving the federal policy that’s getting people killed? Because stat records will be too anemic if we don’t continue endangering innocent people?

“Well, I mean, there’s a number, and the number has to go up.” Unassailable logic, that.

But Lord have mercy. The vocabulary we’re using now is “contamination” language. Infestation. Invasion. Poisoning the blood.

This whole moral horror show is about purity. It’s about the fear that something unclean will get inside us and we won’t be able to get it back out. That fear is old, and too often underwritten by religious devotion. Fear’s arguably the oldest religion there is, after all.

Which is the thing Jesus spent his ministry thumbing his nose at. He touched lepers. He ate with the wrong people so often it became the chief complaint against him. He got contamination backwards on purpose, because in him it ran the other direction. He didn’t catch uncleanness from people. Wholeness oozed off of him and rubbed off on them.

The thing is, you can’t hold that Jesus and the infestation talk together in the same theological mission statement. Clearly, though, a lot of people have quietly made their choice and just stuck with the infestation talk.

I don’t have some great bit of wisdom for all this. It’s Wednesday, and the president has publicly instructed ICE to continue the traffic stops, though the administration hasn’t clearly explained what remains of the temporary pause.

If you want to capture the lives of those men who were shot and killed, you compile and analyze details. Three sons. A three-year-old princess. Petting the dog on the front porch. Little girls in blue pajamas who’ll now bear a trauma that can’t be law-suited away.

But what you don’t do is obsess about a set of arbitrarily decided-upon numbers that get added to some year-end report.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo built houses in Houston for thirty years and had three sons and was almost done with the paperwork.

Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero was twenty-five and had a work permit and a little girl who was three, and two days before they killed him, he wrote that he loved his beautiful princess.

There’s a memorial now at the corner of Hill and Pool.

May God have mercy on them. May God have mercy on all of us.

Be gentle and brave,

Derek