length.
On the second day of watching the house, a white van entered the house’s driveway. The driver of the van and the front seat passenger exited the van. The driver went into the house and the passenger stood by the van’s sliding bay door. I had my video camera going.
After a few minutes, the driver came back outside accompanied by a second man. They went directly to the van’s door and talked a few minutes before finally opening the door. From my vantage point, I could see the interior of the van. There were people sitting on the van’s floor. The man at the door scanned the area as if to see if anyone was watching. He looked directly at my vehicle where I was hidden and I could feel the look. A small wave of anxiousness passed through me at the thought of being discovered. The feeling passed quickly as the man seemed satisfied that all was ok. He began by removing two people from the van and walking them into the house. The van driver and his passenger stood by the open door. The man from the house returned and took two more into the house. A black sedan came around the corner and slowly drove by. The driver saw the sedan and slammed the van’s door shut. The car passed and they waited a few minutes before again opening the van’s door. The man from the house resumed taking the people from the van in twos. After the first six he slowed the pace and seemed to be waiting about three to four minutes between each trip. While they waited in between trips they stood around outside the van speaking casually while watching the activities around them. Eventually they made ten trips. After the last person was taken out of the van, the driver and his passenger left the house.
CHAPTER 2
My next step would be to validate what I had seen. This meant stopping a suspected illegal alien as we had on the El Huarache case. Even though I knew from experience that what I saw was in fact a smuggling operation, for court purposes, I had to confirm the suspicion by speaking to an actual material witness. That meant officially applying to open a case based on the information that I already had. An open case status provided a means to allocate additional manpower to an investigation. The open case status was granted and I began by looking for manpower to help with the next step. In response to my official request for manpower, I was given a team of nine agents who were assigned to special duties in the Inland Empire area. The team’s assignment was called Operation Disrupt.
We would follow the same procedure we used on the El Huarache case. We hoped to see another suspected load of smuggled aliens as it arrived at the house. We would try to record the activity on video and with photographs. We hoped to get a chance to see the smuggler take payment in exchange for an illegal alien he had smuggled. For the next two days the Disrupt Team worked on surveillance at the target house. There was nothing to report. No traffic at all. It was almost as if the smuggler had seen our surveillance teams and had stopped doing his usual business.
On the third day of surveillance at the same house I got a call from the Temecula Border Patrol office regarding a “failure to yield” pursuit that was northbound on Interstate 15 from Temecula. Border Patrol attempted to stop a pickup truck for an immigration status check. The driver of the pickup refused to yield and instead, chose to run. The Border Patrol wanted to know if we could help them stop the pickup truck.
The team immediately discontinued the surveillance operation and went to areas that covered all possible routes north. I did not then realize that the call would be the start of an investigation that would prevent us from coming back to the case we had just started. We were in position to assist the chase when I took another call from the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol dispatcher told me that his units had stopped the pursuit and that the Sheriff’s Department had now taken over the chase. With the Sheriff in control of the chase, we would not join the pursuit unless they requested our help. We held our positions just on the chance that the Sheriffs might need our help. About five minutes later the pickup truck passed our location with several Sheriff’s vehicles in pursuit. We allowed them to pass without engaging in the pursuit ourselves. Instead we listened to the chase via our car radios and noted that the chase had entered a freeway that headed west and towards Los Angeles.
I continued listening to the chase on the car radio and heard that there were people riding in the back of the pickup that were previously not visible. The people were lying down in the pickup bed hoping to avoid being seen. Once they heard sirens and saw the helicopter that was flying overhead they realized they were spotted and sat upright to get a better look at what was happening. The Deputies counted about twenty people that were sitting in the pickup bed. The chase continued on the freeway towards Los Angeles at speeds of about sixty to seventy miles per hour until they caught up to slower traffic. Traffic was heavy and traveling slowly and the driver of the pickup had to slow down as well. The driver of the pickup decided that avoiding capture was more important than safety and began weaving through traffic. Objects began flying out of the pickup and hitting their cars. Sheriff Deputies never knew who began tossing debris but soon they noticed that several riders in the pickup were throwing objects at them. Some of the things being tossed looked like backpacks, shoes, a tire iron and a car jack. The items bounced on the roadway and struck other cars that were caught in the middle of the chase. These cars tried to avoid the flying debris and nearly caused collisions with the cars next to them. The pickup began driving even more wildly. The Deputies stopped trying to avoid debris and were taking hits on their cars rather than take the chance of swerving into a neighboring car. Tensions were high as the chase continued.
When the chase was started by the Border Patrol in Temecula, the pickup had a camper shell attached to the bed. During the chase the shell had begun to fall apart. When the driver began to weave, parts of the shell began to fall off. Now, after exhausting the items in the pickup bed available to toss at the Deputies, they began to rip apart the camper shell. After ripping off a part of the shell, one person could be seen timing his toss as he tried to hit the Deputies car. As the last piece of the camper shell was torn from the pickup bed and moved towards the rear of the bed, several of the fellow passengers could be seen ducking down to avoid being hit as it was also tossed onto the road.
From the original starting point, the chase had now gone about sixty miles when it had hit traffic. Maybe because the passengers had run out of items to throw at Deputies or just because the driver decided he would not be able to lose the Deputies, he slowed the pickup in the middle of the freeway. As the pickup continued to roll, the driver leaped out of the door and ran across the west and east bound lanes and into the nearby hills. The now driverless pickup careened across traffic lanes and onto the side of the freeway. It struck a barricade and came to a stop on the shoulder off the roadway. Even before the pickup came to a halt, the passengers jumped off the pickup and ran off the roadway into the nearby vegetation. The Deputies elected to go for the group rather than chase the lone driver. They quickly caught up to the group.
When the chase ended and our help was not needed, we decided not to return to the surveillance and instead called it a day. I went home and was relaxing after dinner while watching the evening news. The chase that occurred that day was the top story. The news person described how the chase had developed and how during the chase the pick up passengers had caused a dangerous situation by throwing objects at the pursuing Deputies. They had video that clearly showed people throwing pieces of camper shell at pursuing Deputies. Then I heard the news that shocked me. The news person stated that one or several of the Deputies had mistreated some of the passengers. They had video of a deputy repeatedly striking a person with his night stick.
The dangerous and life threatening pursuit had the Deputies on edge and they had reacted harshly and in the process of arresting the running people, several were injured. The incident quickly became an international hot potato when the Mexican Consul’s office issued a statement decrying the incident as outrageous and as an assault on human rights. The Mexican Consul assured the United States that his office would investigate and insisted that authorities here do the same. News reports stated that the two Sheriffs Deputies involved in the incident took a forced leave of absence from their duties. The same report indicated that twenty-three
