By Marc Benjamin
The Fresno Bee
FRESNO, Calif. — Law enforcement officers aren’t looking for a fight when searching for dangerous felons, but they have to be ready for it.
Officials say thorough preparation, gun training and the use of anti-ballistic body armor help officers survive battles such as Tuesday’s at a southeast Fresno apartment complex, when a wanted kidnapper tried to shoot his way to freedom.
He ended up dead in a hail of gunfire, but injured three officers before he fell.
Tuesday’s incident was the exception to the rule because nearly all warrant searches come to an uneventful end.
Of 1,200 warrants executed in the past year in the 34-county federal Eastern District of California, Tuesday’s shooting was the first, said Albert Najera, U.S. marshal for the district. The local 12-member team searches for fugitives from Bakersfield to Modesto.
“The mindset is eliminating the threat, and that’s precisely the mode they went into,” Najera said of the officers involved.
Once gunfire began Tuesday, members of the U.S. Marshal Services Pacific Southwest Fugitive Task Force relied on their training.
The search team consisted of nine officers from four law enforcement agencies — California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the U.S. Marshals Service, Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and Fresno Police Department.
Despite the different badges, team members train together throughout the year.
Search teams are intentionally large, Najera said, because suspects are less likely to respond violently when confronted by an overwhelming force.
“People may think it’s overkill to have that many officers, but I would much rather have these (suspects) scared into surrendering,” he said. “They see a team of 10 and they say it’s time to cash in their chips and surrender.”
Scenarios train officers
To become deputy marshals, officers undergo training in Georgia that is reinforced every three months regionally. That’s in addition to monthly marksmanship training, much of which is spent in marksmanship on the move, said Steve Roncone, task force training coordinator for the Southwest Pacific Fugitive Task Force.
“We should never be caught off guard,” Roncone said. “We tell them to expect the worst, hope for the best.”
Some of the more important facets of training include switching seamlessly from bearing a rifle to a handgun while in motion.
The training includes using officers as “role players acting as bad guys,” said Kelly Neumann, a special agent with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who supervises the four men from corrections who were at Tuesday’s shootout and serves on the team alongside them.
“None of us are super sharpshooters,” Neumann said. “But we do work on our marksmanship. Most agencies don’t send their people to the range every month.”
Some have served on the task force for 10 years, he said.
In training, Roncone said, officers are shown a 2-liter bottle of blood and told they can lose that much and stay in the fight.
Deputy marshals are taught to make a tourniquet and continue fighting back when they are hurt. If the injury is more serious, a marshal can take cover, but should continue shooting while retreating to safety.
In Tuesday’s gunbattle, a deputy marshal on the warrant team was shot, but continued exchanging gunfire with suspect Jerry Vue outside the apartment until Vue was mortally injured and no longer firing his gun.
The preliminary investigation shows that every shot fired by the unnamed deputy marshal struck Vue, Najera said.
The training classes also bolster deputy marshals’ knowledge about confined-space combat using simulated housing and “simunition” — simulated ammunition.
Much of the training scenario “comes from things that have happened in the field,” Roncone said.
More importantly, the training is done by experienced officers already serving on task forces and who have real-life experience with armed conflicts when serving warrants.
“The current training is very successful, it’s more a mentorship, a brotherhood,” he said. “It’s more about sharing information.”
Equally important, Roncone said, is the classroom training where officers study laws governing the appropriate use of lethal force, so there is no “second-guessing themselves.”
Finding the fugitive
Vue, 27, was wanted for a violent kidnapping in June 2012. He missed a court date a few weeks later and was missing until Tuesday. Police were tipped that he was at the southeast Fresno apartment; within 15 minutes the task force was at the scene.
When deputy marshals serve a warrant they dress in street clothes and drive nondescript vehicles to blend in, Najera said.
It’s the best way “to find people who don’t want to be found,” Najera said. “These are all people facing significant sentences and they are all extremely dangerous.”
On Tuesday, the search team surveyed the area for about 90 minutes before clearing Vue’s relatives out of the apartment and entering to look for him.
Residents in the neighborhood said they knew something was going on before the shooting started because they saw task force members walking in the area.
Other than notifying the Fresno Police Department, word of the search was kept under wraps, so as not to inadvertently tip off Vue.
But keeping innocents out of the fray is a high priority, Najera said.
“We are always concerned about who is in the house, who’s next door or if we need to lock down the schools,” he said. “We are always in discussion about the collateral issues.”
When officers walked into the garage, Vue — hiding behind a pile of clothes — started firing. Officers had been told that Vue would get into a shootout if they found him.
Unlike a SWAT team, deputy marshals are specifically trained to find and arrest fugitives, Najera said.
“We couldn’t do what a SWAT team does in terms of hostage rescue or hostage negotiations,” he said. “Our training is very specific in getting bad guys and making sure nobody gets hurt.”
For example, the Marshals Service requires the use of body armor during fugitive arrests.
In hours spent on surveillance or basic investigative work, a lighter vest — with less stopping capability — often is worn, Najera said.
However, the two officers struck by gunfire Tuesday were wearing heavier-weight ballistic vests, which Fresno police Chief Jerry Dyer said saved the life of a corrections department officer who was shot in the chest at near point-blank range. And the injuries of the Marshals Service agent, who was shot in the side of the abdomen, likely were reduced because of his vest, Najera said.
From what he learned about the Fresno gunbattle, Roncone said, the team did “exactly what it should have done. There is nothing I have heard that I would have done differently. This was your typical entry that we do; they got permission to go in and search and then had to deal with that.”
The Fresno gunfight already is being incorporated into training exercises “because we had guys that don’t (always) wear the vest,” Roncone said.
“This brings it home. You can’t have a better example than this.”
When door knocks turn deadly
- Feb. 25, 2010: Fresno County Sheriff’s Office deputies attempt to serve a search warrant at the Minkler mobile home of Ricky Liles, an out-of-work former security officer. Fresno County detective Sgt. Joel Wahlenmaier, 48, tries to force his way through a door and is shot. More than 100 state, local and federal law enforcement officers swarm to the scene, engaging Liles in a firefight that lasts more than an hour. Reedley police officer Javier Bejar, 28, is fatally shot. According to U.S. Justice Department records, of the 67 officers shot to death nationwide in 2010, 10 were trying to serve warrants.
- Oct. 28, 2010: A shootout at a San Diego apartment leaves a police officer and two other people dead. Officer Christopher Wilson, 50, is fatally shot in the confrontation that begins when San Diego County officers and U.S. marshals go to check on a probationer and serve a warrant on another.
- April 12, 2012: Stanislaus County deputy sheriff Robert Paris, 53, is shot and killed while he and another deputy are serving an eviction notice at an apartment complex in Modesto. The deputies try to enter the residence when the suspect opens fire with a rifle, fatally wounding Paris and a civilian locksmith.
- Nov. 28, 2012: An unarmed animal control officer is shot and killed in Sacramento County while trying to retrieve pets from a home whose owner was evicted the previous day. When officer Roy Curtis Marcum, 45, of Elk Grove and a bank employee knock on the door, the suspect fires a shotgun through the door, striking Marcum in the torso.
- Aug. 28, 2013: Baltimore County, Md. police officer Jason Schneider is shot and killed while serving a search warrant at a home. Schneider, 36, was part of a tactical team that had entered the house in search of a juvenile subject. Schneider is shot several times while pursuing a subject toward the rear of the house. Despite being mortally wounded, he returns fire and kills his attacker.
- Oct. 24, 2013: New Mexico State Police agents in Española get into a fatal shootout with Rogelio Cisneros-Chavez, 22. The agents were trying to serve an arrest warrant for Cisneros-Chavez at an apartment. Cisneros-Chavez dies at the scene; agent Joey Gallegos is shot in the abdomen and survives.