2 Mexicans Were Shot From Behind by Border Agents, Consul Charges

Two Mexican citizens shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents earlier this month were gunned down from behind as they were fleeing from the officers and returning to Mexico, the Mexican consul general in San Diego has alleged. San Diego police immediately challenged his account, which differs substantially from the official version of the shooting.

“They (the shooting victims) were running back to Mexico,” the consul, Hermilo Lopez-Bassols, said in a telephone interview Friday. “They approached the officers, and when they detected they were police, they turned back and started fleeing to Mexico, and that was the moment the shooting occurred.”

The account--which contrasts sharply with the police version contending that the agents opened fire when directly threatened by the men, who were characterized as suspected bandits--was based in part on the consul’s interviews with two survivors of the shootings who are now in custody in San Diego, Lopez-Bassols said.

Viewed Corpses

The consul said his comments were also based on the findings of a Mexican doctor who viewed the corpses; his own personal examination of the bodies, and his review of preliminary findings by the San Diego County coroner’s office. (The coroner’s office Friday declined to release any information on the case.)

The Mexican Embassy in Washington planned to deliver a diplomatic note of protest about the shooting to the U.S. State Department, said Lopez-Bassols, who added that he had expressed his concern personally to Dale W. Cozart, chief Border Patrol agent in San Diego, and to San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen.

“The whole purpose of this is not to create a controversy,” Lopez-Bassols said, “but to clarify the facts. . . . We need a thorough investigation of the incident. Through gunfire, we are not going to solve any problems at the border.”

The controversy is the most recent to surface surrounding the Border Crime Prevention Unit, an elite task force of Border Patrol agents and San Diego police officers that patrols the border canyons, seeking to deter crime against the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who enter San Diego from Tijuana each year.

At Least 18 Dead

The unit, begun in January, 1984, after a similar unit was disbanded in 1978, has been involved in more than two dozen shooting incidents that have left at least 18 people dead. No police officer or patrolmen has been killed, although several have been wounded.

The violence associated with the unit has led some critics to question whether it is actually adding to the border violence. But officials have defended the task force as a necessary deterrent to crime.

In the most recent case, initial police investigation has indicated that the agents were justified in shooting their weapons, according to statements by Lt. Phil Jarvis, who heads the homicide unit, which investigates all shootings by law enforcement agencies within the city limits. However, Jarvis has stressed that the final determination will be made by the San Diego County district attorney’s office.

On Friday, San Diego police homicide detective William Nulton said that investigators had thus far determined that it was “not the case” that the two men who died were fleeing as they were shot. The agents opened fire, Nulton said, after being threatened by suspected bandits, at least one of whom brandished what appeared to be a long knife. Police later found three screwdrivers and a machete at the scene, Nulton said.

The San Diego detective did acknowledge that one of the two dead men was shot once in the back area on his left side, as well as once in the back of his upper left arm. But that fact, Detective Nulton said, does not necessarily mean that the victim was fleeing when he was hit.