Original subtitles

911. What is your emergency?

I'm hearing all kinds of gunshots

down the street from my house.

A typical newsroom, you're listening to

scanners that are going off,

and then you hear "Shots fired."

I'm hearing multiple gunshots.

Officer evacuated to the front for medical...

Just hang tight.

Ma'am? Hold up. Ma'am?

Two people are dead,

and a B.P.D. officer is in the hospital

following an early morning shooting.

As a reporter, we always have questions

that aren't answered right off the bat.

Sometimes they're never answered.

We are trying to be as transparent

as we possibly can be.

Sometimes I think it takes

a loved one coming forward,

telling a reporter, "Please ask this question."

If my brother was here,

I would just tell him how much I love him.

. The man is dead, lady.

Right here, right now.

When things like this happen to your family,

you're going to be second-guessing

what these people do.

Because let me tell you,

you live with this for the rest of your lives.

We made a decision to move to Bakersfield, California,

in the summer of 1990.

I heard through friends, it had everything to offer,

good cost of living, good housing affordability,

and a good future for our kids.

The promise of a good future

draws families to Bakersfield.

But it's a town firmly rooted in its past.

Here in the San Joaquin Valley,

just over 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles,

Bakersfield is a big city with the soul of a small town,

more West Texas than West Coast.

It's a city built on oil, agriculture,

and the hands of hard-working people.

I moved to the United States in 1976

from Mexico to California.

I was about 16 years old.

I met my wife, Teresa Ramirez, attending high school

for the very first time in this country.

When I met her, I said,

"You know what? I love this young lady."

He didn't speak English at all.

I didn't speak Spanish.

And I didn't know how to communicate with him.

So I had one of my friends that knew how to talk Spanish.

I would tell her, and she would tell him what I would say.

The love I felt, it moves barriers of language,

and I learned this language within about a year.

I got pregnant.

We were both happy and joy.

And, I mean, our first child,

it was a gift from God.

I was very excited to be a dad.

I was young, but I knew it came with a lot of responsibilities.

Jorge and Teresa got married February 24, 1979,

exactly one month after their first son,

Jorge Jr., was born.

Hey, Pelon.

My son Jorge Ramirez's nickname was "Pelon."

My daughter Laura.

My daughter Nicole.

They were three years apart, each one.

Everyone had a different personality.

-Merry Christmas! -Hey, the light's on.

1999.

My son was the person

who wanted to do everything on his own.

Thanks, Mom.

He wanted to be out there.

"Dad," you know, "let me try boxing.

Let me try this. Let me try that."

No! Give me the camera!

Laura was a little bit more shied from things.

She was quiet.

Nicole was a lot like her brother, outspoken.

Yeah, we're finally

Yeah, and I graduated today, too!

We had everything we ever wanted.

If my parents struggled, we didn't know.

We lived our best life.

Give me a kiss. Thank you.

I feel like we lived the American dream.

Life in Bakersfield

brought the Ramirez family more joy

than they ever dared to dream.

The good times outweighed the bad,

and Big Brother led the way.

Pelon.

He was that big brother that--

he was, like, really protective of me and my sister.

I took her to her first day of school.

Everybody thought he was so handsome.

They're like, "Is that your brother?"

And I'm like, "Yeah."

They're like, "Oh, my God. He's so cute."

My son's boxing career

started when he was maybe eight years old.

We landed on a gym that was run by an ex-world contender.

He took him all the way to become a Golden Glove champion

and Junior Olympic champion in the United States.

Everybody in the audience here

is screaming "Pelon! Hit him!"

Go after him!

People started calling him Pelon.

I never called him by his name. He was Pelon.

And the winner,

Jorge Ramirez!

Pelon, the boxing prodigy

and beloved son,

would soon become a legal adult.

But without the structure of home,

he began to lose control of his life

to methamphetamine.

"Dad," he says, "It's nothing to do with you,

but it's all the choices that I've made."

In fact, one time in his life,

he tells me, "I need to be put in a rehab home."

We put a lien on the house to borrow some money

and help him through his addictions.

So we were there for him, you know?

And I know he struggled.

He was not perfect. No one's perfect.

His addiction led Jorge in and out of prison.

During one stint,

Jorge became one of California's prisoner firefighters

and wrote this letter to his daughter, Victoria.

"Hi, mija.

I would have wrote you a lot sooner,

but we've been pretty busy fighting fires.

Hopefully sometime this month, we get to travel to L.A.

to fight the Santa Ana fire.

Hey, Daddy only has five months to go.

March 13 is coming up real fast, and I'll be home.

Tori, you're getting so big, you need to slow down.

But you will always be Daddy's princess."

My brother was a drug addict,

and he would get in trouble for possession with drugs.

You know, he hung around the wrong people.

People like Justin Harger.

Justin Harger's wanted

as an armed shooting suspect.

We find convictions for him

on charges like drug possession, sales and transport,

weapons, and resisting officers.

Justin Harger was a fugitive.

And we know through public records

that a number of B.P.D. officers had been trying to track him down.

Justin Harger stayed in the same apartment complex

as my brother.

They were doing drugs,

and I feel like that he was just caught up in that.

He had always talked just about being sober

but was caught up in a lifestyle he couldn't get out of.

In the summer of 2013,

Justin Harger got out of jail

and became jealous

of his old girlfriend's new boyfriend.

So Harger shot him.

I got a phone call, and it was my little sister,

telling me my brother was shot in his leg

while he was asleep at his girlfriend's house.

When I actually was able to go in and see my brother,

he told all of us that he was shot by Justin Harger.

Sulina Quair was afraid

Justin Harger might come to the hospital to finish her brother off.

And then... she saw him.

He had a gun at the hospital in his back waistband.

He definitely was dangerous.

The cops were looking for him.

But Sulina's sister recognized one of the guys with Harger.

It was Pelon.

Jorge Ramirez.

What was going on?

Why would he be around Justin Harger?

My whole family was very scared.

Sulina and her family were terrified.

Justin Harger had already shot her brother,

and it seemed like he was stalking them.

We got home from the hospital.

There's a few cars going by.

We noticed, okay, that looked like the guy from the hospital,

Justin Harger.

You could tell he was looking for somebody.

If I recognized him, I knew he was going to recognize us.

After he shot Sulina's brother,

the police and the sheriff put a warrant out

for Harger's arrest.

He had a violent history,

so the US Marshals also stepped in,

placing Harger on the county's Most Wanted list.

It started as surveillance of Justin Harger,

a wanted felon.

They were going to multiple locations

and trying to track this individual down.

They go around to a gas station, ampm,

think they see the suspect there,

but then at some point get word

Harger is at the Four Points Sheraton.

911. What is your emergency?

-There are gunshots. -Where?

They're coming from the hotel.

How many shots did you hear?

Thirty.

we're gonna have a...

The officer evacuated to the front for medical aid.

We got two down to the rear.

911. What is your emergency?

I'm just hearing loud shots outside.

Just stay inside, okay?

We're already there.

Oh, my God. I don't know what is...

Okay, ma'am. It's okay.

It's okay. Just stay inside.

Ma'am? Hold up. Ma'am?

-Officers are there. -They're here?

Yeah. They're there, just stay inside.

Around 5:00 in the morning, I woke up,

and watching the news

about a shooting that happened at the Sheraton.

Two people are dead

and a B.P.D. officer is in the hospital

following an early morning shooting at a Southwest Bakersfield hotel.

Officers say a standard traffic stop

quickly escalated to a shootout.

A lot of questions still about what led officers

to stop the suspect's car and try to pull them over.

I told my wife, "Today, I'm going to stay home.

I'm going to go to a doctor's appointment."

She went to work.

Later that day, I was leaving my house...

...and I was met by a deputy sheriff.

She handed me a card

with the coroner's office name on top.

And I knew there was something going on.

I asked her straight,

"It was my son?"

And she replied, "Yes."

"Your son died in a shootout last night."

Thanks, Mom.

That morning,

it didn't dawn on me when I was watching the news.

I never thought in my wildest dream

that it was my son laying there on the sidewalk,

murdered, killed.

I didn't know which way to go, where to run.

I didn't know how I was going to arm myself with courage

to let my family know.

He goes, "Teresa, I got to tell you something."

And I go "What?"

Because I can just hear the voice.

And he said, "Your son has passed away.

He was the one on the TV that--

that--that he shot."

I just lost it.

Since then, I haven't been the same.

Mentally, I was like I'm not--

I feel like I'm not here anymore.

Something's missing.

And, like, I feel like my heart--

like, you know, like, it's...

It's just hard.

Jorge's family knew that he died in the shootout,

but the question still remained.

Why?

When I told my brother

that Justin Harger was shot and killed,

he turned and looked at us like, "What did you guys do?"

And I'm like, "It was the cops."

"Bakersfield police officers

attempted to make a vehicle stop.

Shortly after,

an officer-involved shooting ensued.

The occupants of the suspect vehicle

were identified as Justin Brian Harger

and his passenger identified as Jorge Joel Ramirez.

When I heard that press release,

I honestly thought, "There's more to this."

"Both occupants of the suspect vehicle

were struck and pronounced deceased at the scene.

There are no outstanding suspects."

The police wasn't telling us the truth,

and obviously, they weren't telling

the citizens of this community the truth either.

Wearing a police uniform

is something that a lot of kids aspire to do.

You played games.

You know, cops and robbers.

I always wanted to be the cop.

In college, I was studying to become a schoolteacher.

But when I went on a police ridealong,

I saw the action, and I was hooked.

I changed my major to criminology.

I applied to the police academy.

Damacio Diaz grew up in Kern County

and was a police officer here for 20 years.

I did very well in the academy.

I graduated number two overall.

And when I became a police officer,

I was in love with the job.

I never thought I would do anything

other than be a police officer.

That was my love and my dream.

I'm a retired law enforcement officer

with about 30 years' experience

with the Kern County Sheriff's Department.

I worked a number of specialized units within the department.

The camaraderie of law enforcement

is very gratifying.

My dream was to become a deputy sheriff as a youngster.

I had a visit at the school that I attended,

the K-9 handler,

who demonstrated some tricks with his K-9,

and I just fell in love with it.

NARRATOR: Bakersfield sees itself as a law and order town.

Many residents trust and admire law enforcement.

Normally, a person that goes into law enforcement

has a relative or a friend who encourages them to join.

The current sheriff has a son who's a sergeant

for the Bakersfield Police Department.

The former sheriff, Mack Wimbish,

his son was a B.P.D. officer, and the list goes on and on.

So, a lot of the officers we have here in our community

are homegrown.

They all know each other. They went to high school together.

There was a sitcom in the '90s

based off of how backwoods Bakersfield is.

Bakersfield P.D.

It's really highlighting the country nature

of, like, the Valley and, really, Bakersfield.

-Where you from? -Uh, D.C.

District of Columbia.

Colombian, huh?

Now they're hiring foreign cops.

Unbelievable.

Does he even speak English?

Welcome to Bakersfield.

Oh, yeah, no, that--that's--Wow.

This is, like, so on the nose, like, it hurts.

I think if you were to ask folks, you know,

"Do you feel safe here in Bakersfield,"

you'll probably get mixed responses.

Some folks will feel safe in certain parts of the city

and not safe in other parts of the city.

I had never known Bakersfield

to be a violent place as an outsider.

But coming in, I think that changed pretty quickly.

Usually, I see people beaten up on the streets and whatnot.

At least 25 people

have lost their lives to violence

in Kern County so far this year.

Before I applied to be a police officer in Bakersfield,

I was a police officer in the city of Tulare,

a small community.

And I wanted more action.

And at the time, back in the mid-'90s,

the city of Bakersfield

and the Kern County Sheriff's Office

had a reputation of being very aggressive

in their police tactics.

There were a lot of police officer-involved shootings.

To be honest, those things attracted me.

I wanted to be part of an agency that was proactive,

that was aggressive,

because I wanted to be part of the action.

In 2011,

Bakersfield had 11 gang-related shootings.

In 2012, that number more than doubled to 31.

And as of July, there have been 32 shootings this year alone,

all gang-related.

I wanted to cover homicides.

I knew the homicide rate in Kern County

and in Bakersfield was pretty high.

I remember a professor telling me in school,

"If you want to cover crime, go to Bakersfield.

There's a lot of weird stuff that happens there."

And I didn't really know what that meant

until I got here.

Kern County Sheriff's Office.

There's a man laying on the floor

I have it all on video camera.

We videotaped the whole thing.

Okay. Hang on one second, please.

Never seen anything like that in my life.

I never would wish anything like that upon anybody,

not even my worst enemy.

Sulina Quair happened to be driving by a hospital

when she saw a man lying on the ground.

What happened next was so shocking to her,

she took out her phone and started to record.

We drive into Kern Medical Center.

There was a man leaning against the gates.

He looked like he was asleep.

We heard multiple cop cars

coming down Mount Vernon.

I mean, you could hear their...

...like, fast, pulling up to the man at the corner.

Kern County Sheriff's deputies swarmed the area,

followed by California Highway Patrol officers.

They confronted David Silva.

Stay calm.

I started recording as they approached him

and started beating on him.

Keep recording. Keep recording.

Why are they doing that?

It was almost like they lost control and lost their mind,

like something took over their bodies that evening.

I'm thinking to myself, "Record, record, record."

But recording it didn't stop it.

So Sulina did the only thing she could think of.

I'm like, "Eff this.

I'm calling the cops on the cops."

This is the supervisor of the communications center.

-May I help you? -My name is Sulina.

I'm standing right here on the corner

of Flower and Palm right now.

And you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

eight sheriffs.

The guy was laying on the floor

and eight sheriffs ran up

and started beating him up

the man is dead, lady. Right here, right now.

I got it all on video camera

and I'm sending it to the

These cops have no reason to do this to this man.

Sulina Quair says she witnessed

seven sheriff deputies and two CHP officers

beat 33-year-old David Silva repeatedly.

Just 19 minutes

after they discovered him laying here on this sidewalk,

he was dead.

They murdered that man that night.

David Silva,

an unarmed man sleeping on the sidewalk,

ended up dead while in the hands of law enforcement.

The question was, why?

May 7th, David went to go see my mom mid-afternoon.

My mom was the manager at an apartment complex

right near him, so he'd always visit.

David Sal Silva was a man in his thirties.

He had four young children and a girlfriend.

I think, at some point, he felt like he needed help.

We don't know for what reason,

but he looked like he was in distress.

David Sal Silva

had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child.

His toxicology report would show that he had medications

for both ADHD and anxiety in his blood

the night he died.

The night that David Silva goes into Kern Medical Center

for what was reported as a mental health issue,

he was turned away.

He was directed to what's called the Mary K. Shell Center.

They're on the same property,

and that's a mental health center.

The security officer walked him off the premises,

and he saw Mr. Silva walk across the street.

In his deposition,

the security guard described Silva

as under the influence but relaxed.

He escorted Silva off the premises

because he kept falling asleep on hospital property.

The security officer called the sheriff's office

and told them the gentleman was asleep

in front of the house on the corner,

right across from the hospital,

and he might need some help.

A sheriff's deputy showed up on scene...

...and started to wake Mr. Silva up

by doing a sternum rub on him.

A sternum rub is a pain-inducing method

to test a person's response.

There's a full expectation

that there will be a physical reaction from that person.

So no professional police officer

who's been trained on using this technique

should be shocked when a conscious person

reacts physically to that technique.

According to the investigators,

he gets up and becomes combative.

That's really where this situation, as we would learn,

took a pretty difficult turn.

We went off of what deputies were saying,

he was agitated, could not be calmed down,

and was allegedly attacking officers.

What progresses over the next 15 minutes

is Mr. Silva is violently taken to the ground

by multiple deputies.

There were seven deputies in total on scene,

joined later by two California Highway Patrol officers.

This is requesting a backup here at 148

at Flower and Palm.

10-4

In a situation like this, it's called a 148--

resisting arrest,

and anyone who's close by is expected to respond.

They had him in handcuffs.

They hogtied him,

which is a banned practice by most police departments.

Many police departments

have banned hog tying for decades.

The Kern County sheriff policy still allows it,

but only in the gravest of circumstances.

They also put a K-9 on Mr. Silva.

They put a spit mask over his face

which further restricted his ability to breathe.

There were some witnesses that were across the street,

and one or two of them

had taken out their cellphones and videotaped it.

When you hear the gargle,

you could hear the...

He tried to fight as much as possible to survive.

"The body is covered with blunt force injuries

of a fairly superficial nature.

These areas consist of abrasions and bruises.

No fractures are detected.

Signs of blunt force trauma

to the left side of the anterior head.

There are several areas consistent with dog bites.

None of the injuries to the body are at a level of pathology

considered to be lethal."

The screaming, I hear at night still.

The gargling of his own blood.

Him saying "Help."

There was nothing we could do about it.

So, after he was restrained in that facedown position,

he ultimately stopped breathing.

Fuck that!

There was 10 cops on him,

but now, the guy stopped breathing.

They're giving him CPR.

I'm still going to therapy for this, so it's not easy.

I heard about David's death

when my dad called me early in the morning on May 8th.

And I was like, "No, he can't be.

That's not possible."

We went to the corner of Palm and Flower.

We had to find out what was happening exactly.

No information was given to us.

We just learned he died.

With no information about what happened

in David's final moments,

Chris wanted answers.

He turned to law enforcement, hoping for the truth.

This is my heart reaching out to him,

and hopefully he will get justice.

And that's all we're doing as a family.

We're just hoping to get justice.

Initial stories, Sheriff Youngblood

is going around just saying he wants transparency,

and we believed it.

If excessive force was used,

I'll stand up and say, "I think excessive force was used,

and we've submitted to the district attorney for a complaint."

I believed that there would be an investigation.

I believed that there would be a transparent investigation,

an independent investigation, a thorough investigation.

I believed that they would do their job.

The cellphones was the first red flag.

Sheriff's deputies contacted Sulina at 3:00 a.m.

the night David Silva died...

...but not for the reason she expected.

Around 3:00 a.m., an officer called us

and asked if we could talk in person.

Two detectives showed up

and asked us what all do we have on video.

And this officer says,

"Don't leave from the front of the apartment right here."

He says, "Before you guys go anywhere,

they want your devices."

Devices for what? This is all we have.

Like, this is our daily phones.

After witnessing David Silva die

while in the hands of police,

Sulina and her family were reluctant

to give their phones to the police.

But deputies told the family they could only leave

if they handed over their phones.

Nobody told us that they were going to take our phones.

They were just gonna speak to us

and look over the video.

Sulina's family offered

to drop their cellphones off at the precinct,

but Sheriff's deputies produced a warrant for the phones instead.

They took everything.

Still to this day,

no phones.

We were left with no video.

The deputies did not have body cams at the time.

The way the videos were acquired were just like any other case.

We will go to a judge, we get a search warrant.

To get a warrant for cellphones

that you think show your officers doing a good job,

what do you think is on it?

People aren't stupid.

The Sheriff's Department didn't seem to trust the witnesses

to handle the evidence.

The first phone that we have video,

the person did not know how to send us the video

while we were standing there.

He proceeded to take the phone apart to try and videotape it.

We then called a deputy district attorney and said,

"Here's what we got."

And our instructions and our advice was "Take that phone."

And the witnesses felt they couldn't trust the sheriff

to handle the evidence.

It is standard procedure

to work with somebody to elicit their cooperation,

to be able to get a copy of the footage.

I haven't necessarily seen that you're writing search warrants

to seize somebody's private property

that's otherwise not involved in the case.

The video was obviously the most vital thing to have.

That's why the sheriff's deputies wanted it so bad.

They could hear David crying over and over.

You know, like, you could hear it.

That's evidence, you know? That's proof.

David Silva's family felt what happened to him

was part of a disturbing pattern of policing in Kern County.

A shockingly high per capita rate of unarmed citizens here are shot to death

or otherwise die while in the hands of police.

So when I first heard about the David Silva case,

it really hit home to me.

The 33-year-old leaves behind four children

between the ages of two and ten.

When months go by and my brother gets killed...

Officers shot and killed Jorge Ramirez Jr.

and Justin Bryan Harger.

...and I'm noticing the same type of investigation.

Police not answering a lot of questions,

saying that it was still under investigation.

This is going to be a lengthy investigation.

My promise to you is, at the end of the day,

I will stand in front of you

and give you the best answer that I possibly can.

It takes 90 to 120 days to get a toxicology back on any case.

And we're working on that.

We're on the corner of Palm and Flower

in Bakersfield, California.

This is where my brother died.

Eleven steps away from the main hospital in town.

Donny Youngblood did a two-week investigation

on David Silva's case, my brother.

Official announcement,

law enforcement did their job.

Point blank.

The pathologist says

that the cause of death for Mr. Silva

is hypertensive heart disease.

And the manner of death is accident.

Other conditions that contributed,

acute intoxication,

chronic alcoholism,

severe abdominal obesity,

chronic hypertension,

and acute pulmonary cardiovascular strain.

What Sheriff Youngblood didn't mention

was that another contributing factor in David Silva's death

was the forceful restraint applied by officers.

Investigators say they followed agency protocol

that included the use of batons to control David Silva.

It could entirely be possible

that the ultimate cause of death

had to do with some type of heart failure.

But one would assume

that there would be other contributing factors

associated with the physical struggle

that he had with officers

that would not make the case a murder,

but at least maybe make it some type of a homicide.

The ensuing investigation

has prompted charges of a cover-up

by law enforcement in the Central Valley.

I wasn't happy with it at all.

I don't think it was transparent at all.

He's a coroner.

That's a conflict of interest.

Despite having no medical expertise,

the sheriff in Kern County

is also in charge of the coroner's office,

just like 47 other counties in California.

I don't agree with it,

because somebody that works at the coroner's office

is not going to contradict his boss

and make him look bad in an investigation.

It felt like a cover-up.

It felt like something that was being washed away.

In this case, one of the disturbing things that came out

was that the pathologist concluded

that the cause of Mr. Silva's death

was hypertensive heart disease,

and he ruled the manner of death as being accidental.

But when we took his deposition,

we asked him, "What information did you know

at the time that you prepared your report?"

"I was told there's no foul play.

I believe it was the sheriff homicide investigating officer,

probably his partner as well,

who are responsible for looking into this,

make sure that there was no foul play.

If that's false, then my conclusions may have to be changed."

So, in my experience,

a pathologist should normally be provided all the information

if they're going to do an investigation

as to the cause of death.

They should have access to what actually took place.

And would you agree

whether there was foul play in any case

would ultimately probably be decided by a judge or a jury?

No. It would be decided by the sheriff coroner.

But even if a pathologist

is made aware of foul play in a particular case,

ultimately, in Kern County, the sheriff has the final word.

It's my belief that David couldn't breathe

because of nine officers on top of him.

Right after getting mauled by a dog.

In deposition, even officers involved

admitted that David Silva posed no real threat.

Did you ever see Mr. Silva

armed with anything that was a weapon

-or could be used as a weapon? -No.

Did you sustain any injuries during the incident?

No.

Was this an incident, in your mind,

where lethal force was appropriate?

No.

And why not?

Mr. Silva didn't appear to be threatening anybody's life at that time.

David was defenseless. David was not a threat.

But that's their own testimony.

It almost went to civil trial.

And I made the decision to settle.

So, the case settled for $3.4 million.

The $3.4 million settlement,

it's kind of an ironic figure because some years earlier,

Sheriff Donny Youngblood,

while addressing a group of officers,

made some remarkable comments.

Do you know what happens when a guy makes a bad shooting

on somebody and kills them?

Three million bucks, the family goes away.

Which way do you think is better financially:

to cripple 'em or kill 'em?

For the county?

-Kill them. -Absolutely.

He said that years ago before David's death.

So he's basically saying it's okay to do whatever you need to do.

Just do it quickly and do it cheaply.

In this settlement,

the Sheriff's Office didn't admit to any wrongdoing.

A settlement may end a family's fight with police,

but it doesn't end their trauma.

Despite them saying

"We're not admitting to any wrongdoing

when we settle these cases,"

when you pay $3.4 million to settle the case,

that demonstrates in and of itself

that there was something terrible that happened.

The fight was the hardest thing I've ever been through.

It changed my entire life--

my mentality, my faith, my hope,

my understanding of justice and law.

It changed my interactions with my family.

And you can see it on my mom's face,

who still believes there's some kind of chance

that David will get justice.

So, yeah, it's killed everything that we thought was true.

I'm going to be minus one son.

Remember that.

I remember seeing the Silva case on the news

and just being so affected by it.

And I would see his brother on the news in tears,

just talking about his brother.

And I just, like, couldn't imagine that being me.

Aww, look, it's me and my baby. There she is.

And just not knowing, a few months later,

that was going to be me.

Sorry.

Two men shot and killed by Bakersfield police officers

outside the Sheraton Hotel in central Bakersfield.

Those men, Justin Harger and Jorge Ramirez.

Both suspects died on scene,

and one B.P.D. officer was shot in the head.

The east side of the parking lot

here at the Sheraton, this is where it all happened

as police officers attempted to stop that vehicle

in the middle of the night.

When I found out how my brother died,

I kept saying, "No, there's no way.

There is absolutely no way."

The Four Points Sheraton was on complete lockdown

for most of the night and early morning hours.

Seeing the news that night

and just seeing them calling him a suspect,

I could not believe that.

So I am waiting to see the real story.

I'm waiting for them to expose to us

what really happened that night.

I was waiting for our department,

the department I had faith in,

to hold their officers accountable.

And we didn't get that.

What we did get was the news posting

a picture they find of my brother on the Internet

with his tattoos all over to make him look like a bad guy.

Shot and dead at the scene, Jorge Ramirez.

We obtained court records

showing he was arrested August 14th,

accused of having a large amount of methamphetamine

and items consistent with drug sales.

Jorge Ramirez had a criminal protective order

placed against him

and was on parole for possession of stolen property.

Jorge Ramirez struggled with drug addiction

all of his adult life.

He stole property. He served time.

But he wasn't known to be a violent criminal.

His family refused to accept

that Jorge's record told the whole story

of what happened to him the night he was killed.

They weren't presenting the nice, loving brother,

the nice, loving father that we knew.

They wanted to present to our community

that my brother was a criminal

who had to have a place in the shooting.

It's no accident

that police agencies tend to put the story out

and frame it in a particular way.

And that kind of shapes the narrative moving forward.

We buried my brother around the 26th of the month.

I got a phone call from a friend of mine.

She said, "Hey, I have some news to tell you."

And I was like, "What?" You know, "What was this news?"

She was like,

"Your brother was working with the cops that night."

And I was like, "What? What did you say?"

And she's like, "Your brother was working with the cops."

Shots fired. Unconfirmed...

Immediately, I called his girlfriend,

and I was like, "Hey, you know the sneaky app

you added on his phone?"

She's like, "Yeah, I have the logins."

I was like, "I'm picking you up."

Honestly, I was kind of scared to look at his phone.

My brother's history wasn't good.

He was a drug addict.

And I truly just didn't want to be hurt

by something on his phone.

I drove to her house, picked her up,

and we went to the FedEx store to print out these messages.

And we logged into their computer.

We got the messages.

And what I seen, I was just like, "Wow. Wow."

I'm telling her, "Do you see this?"

Like, "Are you reading what I'm reading?"

He was working with the cops.

And I can't tell you

the adrenaline that I felt at that moment.

I called my dad and I'm like, "Dad, he wasn't a suspect."

And that was, to me, the best feeling,

knowing that I have the truth in my hands,

and I'm going to tell everyone.