Brett Kelman

The Desert Sun

Three police officers tiptoed down an empty road toward a doublewide trailer surrounded by farmland, keeping their voices low and their flashlights off as much as possible. It was after 2 a.m., but a bright moon hung overhead, illuminating the front yard where a tire swing swayed faintly, as if someone had just been there.

The officers slipped through a chain-link gate on a dirt driveway, trying to stay quiet, but awoke a pack of dogs, who started barking. They spotted movement in one of the windows of the trailer. Someone inside was awake. Their cover had been blown.

Suddenly, the front door of the trailer swung open. The officers flipped on their flashlights, revealing a man standing in the doorway, dressed only in his underwear.

He had a shotgun.

“I was afraid that he was going to shoot me,” said Deputy Mike Ramos, describing to investigators what happened next. “And so I said ‘police!’ and I was already – I wanted to shoot him as quick as I could before he had a chance to shoot me. … I was already reacting to what he was going to do.”

The man in the doorway was Juan Carlos Rodriguez-Ayala, 35, a Thermal farm worker who was shot three times by Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies in the early morning hours of Sept. 26, 2015. The shooting was a chaotic event, mired in fear, confusion, coincidence and misinformation, according to a Desert Sun analysis of law enforcement documents. Deputies were investigating a report of a gunman, but came to Rodriguez’s house by mistake. Rodriguez believed the cops were car thieves, so he tried to scare them away with a shotgun that was loaded but not cocked. Police shot him almost instantly.

“There are so many things that came together to create a bad outcome, it would be difficult to think this up as a training scenario,” said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington D.C. think tank. “But it did happen. And the fact that it occurred once means it could happen again.”

To better understand how the Thermal shooting occurred, The Desert Sun has analyzed more than 300 pages of law enforcement documents from the criminal investigation of the shooting which were recently released by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, which cleared then deputies of any criminal wrongdoing. These documents include transcripts of interviews with everyone involved, which show that Rodriguez and the deputies mostly agree as to how the shooting happened – with two major disparities.

First, police say Rodriguez opened the door of his house “ready to fire” with the shotgun pointed from his hip. Rodriguez says the gun was slung on a shoulder strap and pointed at no one.

Secondly, deputies say that one of them shouted ‘Police!’ in the seconds before they opened fire. Rodriguez insists the deputies didn’t identify themselves until after he was shot. Deputies admit they didn't give Rodriguez any instructions before they shot him.

“How come you didn’t drop it when we said ‘Police?’” asked Deputy Paul Heredia, speaking to a collapsed Rodriguez in the moments after the shooting, as they waited for medics to arrive.

“Man,” Rodriguez responded. “When you said ‘police’ you already shot me, man. You shot me like first.”

This Desert Sun analysis comes at a time when police are under ever-increasing scrutiny for shootings nationwide. Earlier this month, two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, were killed in highly publicized and extremely questionable shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. The deaths reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement, which organized protests across the country. Violence returned one day later, when a black sniper targeted white cops at a protest in Dallas, killing five officers. Ten days after that, another gunman – described by police as a black separatist – killed three officers in Baton Rouge.

Black Lives Matter protesters march in Palm Springs

The Rodriguez shooting involves none of this racial tension, but experts say it speaks to the equally complex issue of policing in a nation that is overflowing with guns. Police officers are trained to shoot to kill if faced with a threat of deadly force, but gun-owners are allowed to use their firearms to protect their homes. Between these two dogmas is a narrow scenario where everyone has a gun and nobody gets shot, but the margin of error is razor thin, and the stakes are a matter of life and death.

“Gun control is the answer, but apparently that ain’t going to happen in this country,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina. “So, if you take that off the table, then instead police have to deal with threat assessment.”

Alpert – a nationally recognized expert on police shootings – said the prevalence of firearms in America has forced police to prepare to encounter guns at every turn. For example, officers who respond to an armed robbery at a gas station will be chasing a gunman, but they must also be cognizant that the cashier probably keeps a gun behind the counter, and any bystander in the store may be wearing a pistol. The protest in Dallas was even more complex: A single sniper fired upon police, but some of the protesters were legally carrying rifles, and easily could have been mistaken for the attacker.

“We put our police officers in untenable situations, and the margin of error is very small,” Alpert said. “And because of all this, and decisions they have to make, in the split seconds they have to make them, there are going to be failures.”

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department would not comment on the shooting. Instead, the agency issued a general statement saying police officers have the difficult job of instantly evaluating the "aggressive behavior of strangers," but declined to discuss this particular incident because Rodriguez has filed a lawsuit accusing the agency of negligence and excessive force.

"The bottom line is that we test, hire, train, and equip the best to serve as deputy sheriffs in our communities," said Sgt. Chris Durham, an agency spokesman, in a prepared statement. "We cause them to frequently go in harm’s way by the very nature of their job to protect those communities. That invariably places them in dangerous circumstances, where difficult decisions must be made with sometimes little information or warning."

Thermal man says police shot him, then lied about it

In court, county attorneys have argued that Rodriguez’s injuries are his own fault because he failed to “exercise ordinary care” to protect himself.

Rodriguez’s attorneys say the opposite. Faced with a mysterious light in his front yard, he did what “anyone would do,” they said.

“This case is about a man who was asleep, with his family, in his home, and was awakened by lights he doesn’t understand,” said Ian Samson, one of Rodriguez’s attorneys. “He was trying to figure out who was on his property and why, and in the process of doing that, he’s shot by the police for no reason.”

Rodriguez's attorneys would not allow him to give an interview for this story.

The events that led to the Thermal shooting began at about 1:50 a.m., when a man called 911 to report that his son was outside of their home, firing a gun. The man said he needed help, and asked for some cops to come out to the house – 69470 Polk Street.

Four officers responded to the call – Deputy Miguel Ramos, Cpl. Adan Yamaguchi, Sgt. Jessica Vanderhoof and Sgt. Paul Heredia. They gathered together at the address on Polk Street, but found only a reservoir on the edge of a farm.

There was no gunman. No witnesses. Not even a house where they could investigate.

What the police didn’t know, however, was that the address was wrong. It would later be discovered that the 911 caller, who had been drunk, had conflated two addresses, making up one that didn’t exist, according to case documents. But police were now searching for a gunman with no clue they were in the wrong place. The investigation was off to a bad start, and it would only get worse.

The four officers searched the area for nearly an hour. They tried to call back the 911 caller but got no answer. Stumped, they began to explore down a dirt road, which ran along the edge of the reservoir and disappeared into the fields. Eventually, they stumbled upon a farm worker and asked him for directions. He pointed further down the dirt road, where two trailers sat at the intersection with Fillmore Street.

Those were the only homes in the area, the farm worker said. Whatever they were looking for, it was probably down there.

Bolstered by a new lead, the cops walked back to their patrol cars. Yamaguchi left to investigate another angle, but the three other deputies drove around the farm to Fillmore Street. They parked far from the trailers so their headlights wouldn’t be spotted, then proceeded on foot, trying to stay stealthy. Ramos grabbed an AR-15 out of his patrol car.

At the trailers, the cops read an address off a mailbox – 69470 Fillmore Street. The house number matched the address given by the 911 caller, even though the street was wrong.

This must be the place, the officers thought.

Inside the house, Rodriguez was fast asleep. Barking dogs awoke Rodriguez’s common-law wife, Monica Resvaloso, who then woke him up. He rose out of bed and walked to the living room to peek out a window. A flashlight was gleaming in the corner of his property, near the gate to his driveway.

“I got scared because I thought that someone wanted to rob (us),” Rodriguez said, speaking to police in Spanish during the follow-up investigation, according to an interview transcript. “I didn’t know who was outside.”

Alarmed, Rodriguez grabbed a shotgun from under his bed and headed for the door. According to Rodriguez’s description of the event, he was shot before he had even fully stepped outside, and the force of the bullets knocked him back into the trailer, where he fell to the floor.

Police fired at least seven shots at Rodriguez. Three struck him in the bicep and shoulder, shattering his bone, so that his arm hung limp. Two others hit a pickup truck parked in front of his trailer, leaving bullet holes in the tailgate. Another bullet burrowed through the wall of a trailer, ending up in the bedroom where Resvaloso was holding their infant child.

At least two shots were fired from Deputy Ramos’ rifle. Five more were fired by Deputy Heredia, who used a 40-caliber pistol. The third officer, Deputy Vanderhoof, had her gun drawn but did not pull the trigger because she was behind Heredia and did not have a clear shot.

Rodriguez did not fire either. Rodriguez said he only planned to use the weapon to scare away whomever was outside, so the chamber of his shotgun was empty. He could not have fired without first cocking the weapon. Police could not have known that at the time.

After the shooting, the deputies identified themselves as being from the sheriff’s department. They ordered Rodriguez out of the house, then had him lay on the lawn until an ambulance arrived. He was rushed to John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, then later transferred to Desert Regional Medical Center.

Police interviewed Rodriguez about 10 hours after the shooting, as he lay in his hospital bed. A transcript shows that detectives asked him six separate times if he was pointing the shotgun or ready to shoot when he exited the trailer. The interviewer said repeatedly that it was OK if Rodriguez was pointing the weapon – it was, after all, "his right" – but Rodriguez's answer was always the same. The gun was slung over his shoulder by a strap.

“That’s the way it was,” Rodriguez told investigators.

Later that day, the sheriff’s department issued a press release saying the deputies had identified themselves as police officers, then shot Rodriguez after he pointed the shotgun “in their direction.”

Editor's note: This story is part of an ongoing Desert Sun series that uses public records to study Coachella Valley police shootings. To read more of this coverage, check out these links.

Police officer: 'I had no choice' but to shoot Marine

Mourning for slain officer, Indio cop shot fleeing man

Indio cop in fatal shooting: ‘I saw the gun clear as day’

Killed on Christmas: Case file opened in police shooting

Investigative Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @TDSbrettkelman.