HOUSTON – A man who called Houston Police to report a shooting was detained by federal immigration agents at the scene and the Harris County District Attorney is now speaking out.
Houston Police say the incident happened around 9:30 a.m. Sunday outside a Home Depot off Bellaire Boulevard. Sources tell KPRC 2 News the man is a laborer and was in the parking lot. According to a police report, he told officers he was not bothering anyone when he saw a man point a black pistol in the air and fire multiple times.
Officers located the suspect, nearby. But when officers brought the suspect back to the parking lot for identification, they found the man who had called 911 was already being detained by federal immigration agents.
HPD says it did not contact or assist ICE. According to the police report, the witness was still able to identify the suspect to Houston Police at the scene before leaving with the ICE agent.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said this situation illustrates a dangerous pattern.
“This is the reportee who notified law enforcement of what was happening. This is a person who then had the courage to stand up while already in ICE custody and identify the person as the one he saw firing the gun into the air,” Teare said.
Teare says the incident highlights two serious problems caused by aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.
“The first is, obviously, it makes it more difficult for us to prosecute dangerous criminals when witnesses are too fearful to participate in the prosecution,” he said.
“But secondly, we’ve seen calls for service for domestic violence, for aggravated robbery, for a lot of the really dangerous crimes out there fall off a cliff. A lot of that is because we know that these people are too scared to even notify law enforcement when they’re being victimized themselves,” Teare added.
Teare acknowledged that while his office has pledged not to ask about immigration status, incidents like this one make that promise harder for community members to believe.
“It’s very, very hard to believe that that is the case when they’re seeing people just like this individual on Sunday be taken from the actual scene when they were doing nothing but helping law enforcement take someone dangerous off the streets,” he said.
Prosecutors were able to charge the gun suspect, David Mendez, with felon in possession of a firearm. Records show his has a lengthy criminal history and had bonded out of jail on a terroristic threat charge two days before the shooting.
Teare says other charges are now in jeopardy.
“We were able to charge him with a felon in possession of a firearm. In that one case, thankfully, we will be able to continue the prosecution without this individual. But there are other charges that we could file and should file in this case. But because we don’t know the location of our eyewitness, it’s going to be very difficult for us to continue on and actually file those charges,” Teare said.
Teare also acknowledged strained communication between his office and ICE.
“The participation and communication between this office and ICE is very, very bad right now. So we don’t have information about how they arrived at that scene,” he said.
He closed with a direct message to the community.
“The real message from this office is, we are not the immigration police. We will never ever ask for someone’s status. My job is to seek justice on behalf of every single person in our community regardless of what your status is,” Teare said.
A spokesperson for ICE sent KPRC 2 News the following statement:
ICE officers arrested Juan Francisco Monroy Turuy, a 54-year-old criminal illegal alien from Guatemala, Aug. 8 after he was encountered in Bellaire, Texas, and it was discovered that he was in the U.S. illegally and had been convicted of a criminal offense that endangered public safety. While in the process of taking him into custody, the Houston Police Department arrived at the scene and alerted ICE officers that Monroy was a witness to a crime. ICE permitted Monroy to provide a statement to HPD and to identify the suspect prior to completing the arrest. He remains in ICE custody at the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas, pending disposition of his immigration proceedings.
Illegal aliens who are in ICE custody may be transferred to appear as a witness under certain circumstances, however, witnessing a crime in and of itself does not prevent ICE from taking an illegal alien into custody or removing them from the U.S. ICE defers to HPD to file for the appropriate applications of relief if he is needed to remain in the United States.