ICE agents told local authorities and the media that they were not chasing Coronado Juarez when he crashed, something they repeated on the phone with dispatchers moments after the crash, according to 911 audio obtained by News 8. The call was made 49 seconds after the car hit the curb.
“We tried lighting the guy up and he wouldn’t stop. We turned our lights off and … He crashed out. The car’s on fire,” a female officer tells the operator. “He looks DOA. The car’s on fire.”
ICE officers were not targeting Coronado Juarez when they tried to pull him over, a DHS spokesperson told News 8. Police records confirmed the officers were looking for the car’s owner, his relative. As his only known relative in the country, that same relative was later the first person notified of Coronado Juarez’s death, police said.
Coronado Juarez was removed from the U.S. by Border Patrol in 2021, according to DHS, but re-entered at some point. The federal government listed no other criminal record for him.
Photos and videos shared by neighbors along with police statements paint a picture of a large and chaotic scene. It’s not clear how many officers were following Coronado Juarez, though the ICE agent told the dispatcher there were “a bunch” of them at the scene. Viewer photos shared with News 8 showed a large police response to the incident, including several law enforcement officers with unmarked cars and unmarked bulletproof vests (bolding mine)
According to a police report, an immigration officer told GRPD he wasn’t sure whether there were any passengers inside the car when it crashed. The female officer repeated that on the phone with dispatchers, “It looks like single occupant, but the car’s pretty mangled, so.”
At one point during the call, the officer can be heard speaking to someone in the background and laughing, “I was just moving in case that car blows up.”
Coronado Juarez was living and working in the U.S. to send money back to his family in an impoverished region of Guatemala. He and his wife were working on building a house for their family, including their three children.
“My husband was just there to work. He sends us money all the time. And now he’s gone,” Coronado Juarez’s wife told Target 8 through a translator in September.