Good.
Harris County prosecutors plan to bring witnesses to the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo before a grand jury “very soon,” District Attorney Sean Teare said in an interview Thursday.
Teare’s announcement comes less than 24 hours after a second witness, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, was released from federal custody. The investigation into Salgado’s fatal shooting July 7 by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has entered “a tipping point,” Teare said in an appearance on Hello Houston.
“Physically, when you’re talking the evidence from before it occurred and what happened that day, I think we’ve gotten just about all we’re going to get,” Teare said. “There are still pieces of evidence we need from the federal government that we are waiting on. But we are much more moving into the evaluation phase and determining what, if any, charge we’re going to present to a grand jury.”
The first witness to the shooting, Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, was released late last month.
[…]
The third witness, Victor Salgado Araujo, is Lorenzo Salgado’s brother. Ruby Powers, the Houston-based immigration attorney who represents Victor Salgado, told the Houston Chronicle Thursday that there has been movement recently in her client’s case, but a timeline on when a federal judge might rule on Salgado’s petition for release is unclear.
Local prosecutors have interviewed all three of the men at some point in federal custody, Teare said.
Teare said investigators with his office have compiled witness accounts and surveillance video that provide a compelling picture of events leading up to and immediately following Salgado’s shooting, but no one has yet provided video of the incident itself.
The lack of evidence of the shooting itself suggests ICE has changed its tactics, Teare said, and is moving toward more surreptitious enforcement.
“The agency has adapted from Minnesota and now you’re doing these operations at 7 a.m. on a side street,” he said.
Federal officials have said agents mistakenly chased Salgado’s van through Magnolia Park neighborhood after confusing him with another target.
See here and here for some background. I have no idea what to expect from this. It’s entirely possible there won’t be enough evidence for Teare’s office to proceed with any prosecutions, especially if the feds continue to be a black hole of information. But we’re already learning some things, and we should know a lot more by the end, even if it’s just a clear statement about what is not available to us. At this point, I’m just happy to have someone with integrity doing an investigation and eventually telling us what they found out. It’s the very least we deserve. Texas Public Radio has more.
UPDATE: The Trib has quite a bit more.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said Friday that federal officials have not provided his office any information about the fatal shooting last month of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by immigration officers in Houston, so he plans to take the evidence his office has collected so far to a grand jury in the “next few weeks,” in part to compel the release of more details.
Teare said his office also may file a federal lawsuit to force the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to provide more information.
“We have now kind of put together as much physical evidence as we think we’re going to get and so the next step is to begin to get witnesses into the grand jury so that you get kind of a fuller picture of what eyewitnesses saw,” Teare said.
Although his office now knows the names of the four ICE agents who were pursuing the white van driven by Salgado Araujo early on July 7, Teare declined to identify them, citing grand jury proceedings that are typically secret until suspects have been indicted. Grand juries also have the power to subpoena agencies, including in the federal government, and conduct separate investigations. Teare said the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Texas Rangers and is conducting its own probe of the shooting, has received some information from DHS that it is sharing with his office to potentially take to the grand jury.
[…]
ICE officers were in unmarked black SUVs and they did not use common emergency lights and sirens as they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo before boxing him in on a narrow residential street partially under construction, Teare said.
Most major state and local law enforcement agencies restrict officers in unmarked vehicles from making traffic stops, according to more than a dozen law enforcement experts who reviewed the available footage. Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina professor who focuses on use of force and is a former police officer, said the footage in this case “looks more like a carjacking attempt than it does a police stop.”
Teare echoed those concerns.
“One of the pursuing vehicles couldn’t even make the turn because they were so close,” he said. “It was a pursuit, and you’ve seen the footage. Their emergency equipment was not activated at that time at all.”
Both the chase and the fatal shots, which the vehicle’s passengers said came from an ICE agent on foot who fired through the right window, “wasn’t done the way that any law enforcement agency that I’ve ever worked with would teach their officers to behave,” Teare added.
“The traffic stop was not initiated correctly. The positioning of people is not the way that it’s taught, and so, no, nothing about that was done the way that any law enforcement agency that I’ve worked with would teach their people.”
Emphasis mine. I cannot wait to hear more.
Bravo for DA Teare. Where are all the “tough on crime” GOPers?