Original subtitles

Officers say a standard traffic stop

quickly escalated to a shootout.

Both suspects died on-scene.

I was very angry at the fact

that they were constantly calling my son a suspect.

It didn't sit well with me.

BPD says Harger began shooting at the officers

and the officers fired back, killing both Ramirez and Harger.

I knew that there was something else going on,

than just what they were saying.

The Ramirez family was searching for answers

when they discovered mysterious text messages

between Jorge Jr. and an unknown number.

Soon as I logged in, I went to the very first text.

We were so stunned and surprised that we found this.

There was a conversation about where they were,

where they were going, after the final moments.

So, as I read more, I was like, "Holy shit.

He was working with the cops."

Just felt like I just found

all my brother's innocence right here.

He wasn't a suspect.

I had to be active in finding out the real truth.

Who holds these people accountable?

And when?

It just never happens.

Guess what. They met their match.

For three weeks after his death,

Jorge Ramirez was portrayed in the media

as a suspect who could've been working

with dangerous and wanted felon Justin Harger,

a story the police didn't correct.

But that version of the story never sat right

with the Ramirez family.

And it turned out there were others

with their suspicions as well.

Kiyoshi Tomono knocks on my dad's door.

The Bakersfield Police Department says...

Kiyoshi was one of our prime time news anchors.

He did big stories.

So, if Kiyoshi came to your house, this is the real deal.

And he said that my brother was working as a police informant.

I did not sleep that night.

And I get a call from my sister.

She's like, "Turn on the news, right now!"

And I was like, "Why?"

She's like, "Just turn it on!"

Bakersfield Police Chief Greg Williamson...

I turn it on and it's our chief of police.

Was Jorge Ramirez Jr. a police informant

and was he acting in any capacity

for the department that early morning?

Mr. Ramirez did contact an officer

of the Bakersfield Police Department

and provide information as to

Mr. Harger's whereabouts

and where he would be on that evening.

Kiyoshi circled back and asked a follow-up,

as any good journalist would do, and say,

"I just want to confirm that he was in fact, an informant."

Was he working in the capacity of an informant,

leading officers to the Four Points Sheraton

that night, to Harger?

He was. We had several correspondence with him.

They then rallied to make a plan

and set up around the Four Points Sheraton.

Ultimately, getting that confirmation from Williamson

changed everything.

It wasn't until that interview

that we learned that Ramirez was an informant

and working with police.

Jorge's family had been in the dark,

searching for answers they couldn't get

from the Bakersfield Police Department,

answers they felt the police had.

Look at Mama.

Say, "Hi!" Say, "Merry Christmas!"

I had never heard of another case

where a informant was injured or killed

the way it happened to him.

How did this unfold?

If Ramirez was working with law enforcement

to lead them to their suspect, a known violent offender,

how did Ramirez end up dead?

My son, prior to his death,

he started to kind of get sentimental and started crying.

I said, "What's wrong, son?"

He goes, "Hey, Dad, you know, I got to tell you something."

He says, "I done some stupid stuff."

I said, "What are you talking about, son?"

He goes, "Yes, Dad.

If something happens to me,

you got to remember this, Dad,

it wasn't my choice."

Bakersfield has long been known as a town that supports its police.

Detective Damacio Diaz arrived as an outsider

from nearby McFarland, a smaller, more rural, town.

I was the first one in our neighborhood, in our family,

in our church, that became a police officer.

When I put on the uniform, there was a lot of pride.

Diaz was determined to make his mark on the force.

But it wasn't always by following the typical path.

I wanted to be the kind of cop that was in the mix.

I didn't want to be the kind of cop that was writing tickets

or going to a report call.

Most police officers will catch the bad guy

with just doing police work.

But there are some criminals that are not going to be caught

or they're not going to be prosecuted

because there's just not enough evidence.

I didn't notice when I was crossing the line.

So, by the time I went to a narcotics unit...

it was very clear what I was willing to do.

Things like go undercover and buy drugs and sell drugs.

For me, my life changed

when I began to to live that lifestyle

in these dark areas, these dark corners.

Young police officers can be pretty impressionable.

What is important is how do agencies

put checks and balances in place

to ensure that people are not going down a bad path?

I believed, with all my heart, that,

so long as the end result was

a bad guy going to prison for a long, long time,

it didn't matter how he got there.

I had always been the kind of guy who was never afraid

to take those steps.

As Damacio Diaz and his partner, Patrick Mara,

rose up the ranks of the Bakersfield Police Department,

they quietly kept their methods under wraps.

I can tell you that there are many, many police officers

that I was friends with, that knew me,

that didn't know how far I had crossed the line

because we didn't discuss those things.

They were not part of that small, small group

and Patrick Mara and I were.

Me and Pat Mara were great friends.

We were very close.

Working with informants was one of our primary duties.

There are some strict guidelines that are expected to be followed

and we are trained on how to

go about signing somebody up to be an informant.

But there are rules and policies

and then there's doing things that most cops,

most police officers in America, have no idea takes place.

For years, Diaz and Mara worked undercover

and under the radar.

And then, suddenly,

Damacio Diaz found himself in the spotlight.

When the McFarland, USA movie came out

and it was an instant success,

of course, everybody in Kern County and Bakersfield

loved the movie because it put us on the map.

Diaz.

Diaz. Diaz.

I could never imagine that anyone

would be interested in our story in McFarland.

-Coach. -It's not going to matter,

-unless-- -Coach.

It's a story about a hard-working family

that comes from nothing, that have great values.

Hey, Damacio.

Look, you wouldn't understand.

It's about Damacio Diaz

and his family of farmworkers

and how he and his brothers became champion runners.

He really became like an overnight celebrity.

The local officer became this movie star.

He attended the premiere of McFarland, USA.

I can distinctly remember the shot of him on the red carpet,

smiling ear-to-ear.

You know, this is just way beyond our dreams,

but we are enjoying it.

We're enjoying the show.

During that time, I had a lot of arrogance about me.

Did it change me? Yes, it did.

Was it for the better?

I would say no.

I allowed myself to get caught up

in all of that Hollywood limelight.

And, soon, Diaz and the Bakersfield Police Department

found the spotlight

a difficult place to be.

How do you do, friends?

Welcome to...

I think Bakersfield is most well-known

for the Bakersfield sound,

which is essentially like a subgenre of country music.

One of the most popular songs, of course, with Buck Owens,

is "Streets of Bakersfield."

Bakersfield is like so many other towns

across the American West--

migrants and outsiders vying

to stake their claim and make a home.

Bakersfield was a destination

for migrants during the Great Depression

that were coming out from places like Oklahoma

in the 1930s, especially.

Never had to lose everything I had in life.

The Joads, in The Grapes of Wrath,

were portrayed as struggling and poor

and they'd lost their land and they were pulled

into California in search of new opportunities.

The diversity that we see in Bakersfield today

is really just an outcrop

of the historical diversity that we've always had here.

Some of my ancestors came straight out of Oklahoma

to do some of the different things in agriculture.

We had Basque families that raised sheep.

We had Italian families that migrated here years ago.

But there are also some pieces that are more sordid and more shameful

and we don't always talk about those, but they have been here.

So, one of the things that you always get,

with any kind of diversity--

often, there are social tensions.

How do I want to say this?

There are definitely areas of town

that are known historically for being areas where...

mostly one race lived there.

Oildale?

Pretty much all-white.

Oildale was a sundown town.

A sundown town is a town where, if you are brown or Black,

you shouldn't let the sun set on you,

meaning you will get killed in one of these towns

that calls themselves white.

Historically, whites controlled law enforcement

throughout Kern County.

In the 1920s, certain leaders of the Bakersfield police were revealed

to be Klan members.

And, to some members of the community,

that legacy informs their relationship with police

to this day.

Law enforcement has had a controversial history here

in Kern County.

It had that good old boy community feel to it.

From 2009 to 2019,

68 people in Bakersfield were shot by police.

81% were people of color.

Black people were four times more likely than a white person

to be shot by a BPD officer.

Latin people were twice as likely.

One thing about Kern County is that many Latino residents say

that they weren't understood by law enforcement...

and that was, perhaps, something that fueled

these confrontations, which sometimes turned deadly.

Calahan. Bakersfield police still investigating

that high-speed chase along Highway 178

that ended up in a deadly shooting.

We were just like, "Oh, my gosh, another thing?

This is exactly what we're talking about."

At the time,

there were stories of law enforcement officers

doing whatever they wanted to do.

There were stories that I didn't know of,

where law enforcement were killing people.

For the Ramirez and Silva families,

every headline about another killing rips open old scars

and adds new members to their grieving and growing group.

James De La Rosa had just left a night out with his girlfriend

when he encountered Bakersfield police.

He was 22 years old

and had never had any trouble with the law.

On November 13, 2014,

officers attempted to stop a Jeep

with James De La Rosa inside.

They said he was driving erratically.

They follow him and, at some point,

on Highway 178, try to initiate a traffic stop

and that's when he starts to flee.

There was a brief chase that ensued

and he ended up pulling up to Mount Vernon and 178.

It was onto the freeway,

missed one exit, got off on the second exit,

hit the center divider, which was a huge impact.

Did he hit his head on the dashboard?

Did he hit his head on the steering column?

Was he dazed?

It's impossible to know James' state of mind after the crash.

But the police released their version

of what happened that night.

Immediately upon him exiting his vehicle,

he began behaving aggressively,

charging towards the officers.

He was yelling obscenities.

There's something that happens

inside of the minds of an officer

when you-- when turn on those red and blue lights

and you've got a car that's not stopping.

You have to remember that those officers had adrenaline pumping.

They were excited.

They didn't know what was going on.

He reached suddenly for his waistband

and grabbed onto his waistband,

at which point officers opened fire.

Mr. De La Rosa was unarmed and there are witnesses

who says that he was holding his hands up.

We don't have witness statements

saying that he had raised his hands in a--to surrender.

In fact, witnesses told a different story,

with some capturing cellphone video on-scene.

We just seen a guy wreck and then he got out

and just he got out of the car

and just waved his hands up in the air

and the cop shot him in the head.

Yeah, oy.

They fucking killed him.

Oh, my God!

He got shot!

Reaching for a waistband has basically been used

to justify many shootings

of unarmed people around America

and James De La Rosa was one of them.

The more the police repeated their version of the story,

the more his family questioned why they would kill someone

who never had a record.

Or a gun.

James is not a weapon person.

There was no weapons on him, no weapons found.

Why would a person just charge the police?

So, why would a person rapidly, quickly advance on police

and reach for their waistband?

You know, are they suicidal?

Are they crazy?

James' family points to one possible explanation.

He had recently lost a lot of weight

and his pants were often loose and would start to fall down.

If he reached for his waistband,

if that did happen, that if that occurred,

it would only be for James lifting up his pants.

They stuck with the story of James got off

and approached the officers and they murdered him.

To the police, this was another justifiable shooting.

But not to the families of those lost.

Don't shoot!

Don't shoot! Don't shoot!

Yet, everyone agreed that what came next

was completely unjustifiable.

So this is kind of where the story takes a very bizarre turn.

Because of it being an officer-involved shooting,

they assigned an officer to stay on guard of the deceased,

which was Aaron Stringer and his trainee.

What happens, according to two documents

which was really the chilling side of the end of the story

was one of the officers, Aaron Stringer, allegedly,

according to his trainee, manipulates the corpse.

Senior Officer Stringer looked around the body at the wounds.

He moved towards the decedent's feet

which had been uncovered when the sheet was moved

off of the upper torso.

While "joking around"

Senior Officer Stringer reached out

and touched the bottom of the decedent's feet

and said, "Tickle, tickle."

Police officers have often been accused, rightly,

of having a morbid sense of humor.

You are a firsthand witness to man's inhumanity to man.

However, there are certain actions and behaviors

that are indicative of a deeper problem.

Senior Officer Stringer turned the decedents head back

to a straight forward position, two times...

It was at about this time

that Senior Officer Stringer said he loves playing with dead bodies

and laughed.

For them to play with their deceased bodies,

you know, so disrespectful and uncalled for.

He touched them in ways that he shouldn't have.

My son was a joke to him.

That was no joke.

This is somebody we held dear to our heart,

that we miss very dearly.

Aaron Stringer was placed on administrative leave.

Officer Stringer may have been fired or may have just resigned,

but no criminal charges were filed against him.

It certainly was a black eye to Bakersfield police.

Aaron Stringer left the department in August of 2015.

Stringer did not respond to our request for comment.

I think, when you hear a story about an unarmed man

who's been shot dead by police officers

having their corpse tampered with and made fun of, that is a very dark,

very disturbing thing to know about.

When I sat down and spoke to Chief Williamson

about some of these really quite shocking

officer-involved shooting cases

that had happened in his city, under his watch,

I asked him about one case in particular,

James De La Rosa.

Sometimes things just ha--

things happen to officers and they're put in situations

and they have to make the split-second decisions

and that's what why they're out there.

I mean, just going back to one of those cases,

Mr. De La Rosa was unarmed.

I don't know who he is.

Which one--which one is he?

James De La Rosa.

He didn't know who he was.

And, to me, at that point,

it was pretty clear there was something

pretty extraordinary going on in this part of the country.

By 2015, as the number of people killed

in officer-involved shootings actually increased,

so did the frustration of grieving families

with law enforcement.

An officer involved in the shooting with my brother

was also involved in the shooting of James De La Rosa.

Name is Rick Wimbish.

R-I-C-K.

Excuse me.

Last name is W-I-M-B-I-S-H.

The detail that we would start to sort of pick out of these cases

was the repetitiveness that these officers

were involved in the shootings.

An officer shot a man allegedly breaking

into a Subway sandwich shop.

One officer fired several shots.

Alderman later died...

Along with the increase in killings,

a pattern appeared to emerge.

Alderman was shot seven times.

After the initial police version was released to the public,

new details often raised serious questions.

In many cases,

it seemed there was more to the story.

It was about 4:20, 4:30 in the morning.

The police knocked at my door

and the police said,

"Jason Alderman reached for his pocket

and he's dead."

And they told me to have a good day and walked away.

Didn't tell me how it happened, where it happened.

Just told me...

they shot and killed my son.

On August 22, 2015,

two Bakersfield police officers passed by a Subway

near Olive and Roberts Lane

that they believed a burglary was happening at.

So, they pulled in and they said

that's when they saw a man walking out armed

with what they believed was a firearm.

They confront Aldermen,

who's coming out of the establishment.

That's where an officer-involved shooting happened.

Jason Alderman was shot and killed by police

at a Subway restaurant in Oildale.

That man, 29-year-old Jason Alderman,

was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The news was hot to trot that, you know,

Jason had some bumps in the road and had some criminal history.

Alderman has a lengthy criminal record,

including arrest for burglary.

I mean, I don't even think it was six hours

and it was all over the news.

That's all that played on the news for days.

A court search shows past cases against him

for drugs, alcohol,

battery on an officer, and vehicle burglary.

People were just, you know, thanking the officers

because another criminal's out of Kern County.

I know my son made a bad choice,

but the police are--

they're not supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner.

Jason Alderman was caught in the middle of a burglary.

But why was he killed by the police?

I was told by the detectives and the BPD

I needed to contact you in order to get a coroner's report.

So, there's nobody assigned to this case.

So...

No. My nephew got murdered.

The person accused of killing him

is the Bakersfield Police Department.

All right. Thank you.

There was obviously initial calls

for whether or not there was surveillance video

in that store when the shooting happened.

Initially, police reported there was no surveillance video

and they did not have it, if there was.

To our knowledge, there is no video,

has never been video,

and we certainly don't have any video in evidence.

The news report was saying that

the surveillance cameras were down from...

11:00 at night to like 6:00 in the morning,

which, again, I found odd because, if you're a business,

I mean, I would think, at nighttime,

you'd definitely want to make sure

your cameras were rolling.

We went to that Subway

and took pictures of the area

and there was cameras outside of the Subway.

And then when we later went back,

they had dismantled the cameras out of the roof.

What was the real story of what happened?

Whatever evidence is there should be, you know,

obtained and catalogued, documented.

So, it's vitally important that video evidence, especially,

is handled appropriately.

So, a woman from Subway reached out to me.

She had posted on Facebook,

"The video was on.

I turned it on before I left."

We did get legal representation immediately.

His legwork was definitely to find out what happened.

In fact, there was police footage

and surveillance video and it did work

and the police confiscated it and took it.

Nothing made sense.

So, I was trying to get as much information

as I possibly could.

I asked, I begged for that video.

I wanted to see it.

One pattern that became clear to us

was that information was slow to be released

and transparency was hard to come by.

It was sometime right before Christmas

and I got a phone call from the police department

and they told me that I could come to the lobby

and pick up the video, so I did.

Mr. Alderman exited the Subway.

He's essentially shot dead pretty much straightaway.

I was completely flabbergasted.

There's no way he saw those officers.

He crouches under the door,

literally almost on his knees,

and then you just see gunshots.

There's no aid rendered.

Two officers pick Jason up

and put him through the hole in the glass

and lay him on the concrete in front of the store.

Like if he was a piece of trash.

I've never seen the video.

I've seen the clips from the news

that they made my son look, you know,

like he deserved it.

I'm not able to watch that video.

I remember getting that surveillance video

and it revealed that

the weapon that police were talking about

was, in fact, a tire iron.

He did not have a gun.

He was holding a black BMW tire jack,

that police ultimately said resembled a rifle,

and that's why they believed he was armed.

I saw he had some type of an object in his hand.

I was at a distance that I just couldn't tell at that point.

Part of the equation is how fast can you pull the trigger

before they have a chance to pull the trigger?

At that time, you believed he was holding a gun?

Absolutely, yes.

I think a lot of officers would've seen that

as a weapon, to be honest.

But you can buy yourself time, if you're behind cover.

You can buy yourself time,

if you're making a good tactical approach.

The problem is, is that, when you're...

at a point of no return

and you don't have time and distance

that allows you to make decisions,

you are going to have to deal

with the very first danger that comes to mind.

He was in the process of either pointing it out the door

or coming out the door with it

about the time I heard the shots.

I'm going to call that bullshit because that is what it is.

If you were to watch the entire video,

that tire jack is never pointed up.

It is always on the side of him.

He is carrying it,

but not like a rifle would be carried,

and it was never pointed to anyone.

It follows this pattern that community members talk about,

which is shooting first and asking questions later.

And you don't really start looking at it

from a different perspective, until it does affect you.

You know, I've always heard about it.

I did follow the Ramirezes' case,

the De La Rosas' case.

I followed that, too.

But I thought, "Man, that just must've been

a couple bad officers."

And, as you start unraveling the layers

and looking at the pieces of the puzzle,

you start to see that there's more

than just a couple bad officers.

When you ask about what discipline

officers have faced,

you don't get an answer.

A shooting is ruled justified

and an officer is returned to work,

but if anybody faces discipline,

it's very hard to know what sort of discipline that is

because it's all shrouded in secrecy.

There is a single officer who was involved

in all three of those cases.

I think, for some people, it's bad luck,

but for other people, it may display

a chronic lack of training and a real culture of impunity.

Jason Alderman died.

What is this chief going to do now?

He declared it was justified

and Rick Wimbish went back to work.

Rick Wimbish declined to comment

on his role in these shootings.

But controversy over policing in Kern County

was just heating up.

A blockbuster story of police corruption was about to erupt

and shed new light on the death of Jorge Ramirez.

Police Chief Greg Williamson

addressed concerns about police corruption--

Bakersfield Police Department detective

-pleads guilty-- -Admitted his guilt

in federal court today, in an ongoing scandal.

So, I show up to the police department.

I'd never seen so many law enforcement officers

from different agencies in a room like that before.

So many different media organizations were there.

Walking into that room, it was a very serious tone.

The public information officer walked around

and handed us each a packet

that sort of detailed the indictment and what happened

and everything kind of blew up from there.

This morning,

Bakersfield Police Detective Damacio Diaz,

43, of McFarland, was arrested in this building.

He was charged in a 16-count indictment

that was returned yesterday by a federal grand jury.

It charges Detective Diaz

with one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess

with intent to distribute methamphetamine,

three counts of bribery,

with nine counts of attempted possession

with intent to distribute methamphetamine,

with one count of illegally disclosing

the contents of a wiretap,

and two counts of filing false federal tax returns.

Damacio Diaz had collected drugs

while working for the Bakersfield Police Department

and, instead of submitting them into evidence,

he put just a portion into evidence

and then sold the rest for his own beneficial gain.

You can't make this stuff up.

One side, a celebrated character in a Disney movie,

and then the fall from grace as a disgraced officer

who's basically trafficking narcotics

onto the streets of Bakersfield.

He was also working with this informant,

telling him information

about what law enforcement was doing,

to help keep him from being prosecuted.

Along with local hero Damacio Diaz,

his partner, Patrick Mara,

was also arrested in the scandal.

Another former detective, Patrick Mara,

admitted his guilt in federal court today,

working with Diaz in an ongoing scandal.

We couldn't believe it.

I just said, "You know, how can them guys do

that kind of stuff, you know, who was watching them?"

I just couldn't understand it.

I did what I did and I was wrong for doing it

and I admit that today.

But I will tell you, in full disclosure,

that I didn't know how to get out.

I had discussed it with my partner,

Pat Mara, numerous times.

We both knew we had to walk away

and stop this behavior, but we were stuck.

I was stuck. I didn't know how to get out

and I was very scared about what was going

to happen to me in the future.

But within a few minutes, after being arrested,

there was such a relief in my spirit,

in my--in my heart, that it was over.

I was relieved. I lost...

focus on who I was and what my purpose was.

I began to not only bend the rules,

I began to cross the line.

In very tiny, incremental steps,

but those small steps added up

and, sooner or later, I was way beyond the line.

Meeting with informants by myself,

paying the informant off the books,

whether it was in money

or whether it was in drugs or in favors,

was a practice that was standard.

That was normal, for me.

If you fail to respond to the cues,

if you fail to acknowledge

that there are problems within your midst,

you're going to have corruption.

As the scandal engulfed

the Bakersfield Police Department,

questions surrounding police conduct over the years

intensified.

If this kind of corruption had taken hold

among BPD officers and the informants they managed,

then what really happened with Jorge Ramirez?

We realized that Patrick Mara

had actually been involved in the Jorge Ramirez Jr. case.

You can draw the conclusion,

from what ultimately happened to these officers

and their fall from grace,

that they didn't always do their job in the right way,

that there was kind of a fly by the seat of your pants

type of informant management process that was going on,

and that very well could have contributed

to some of the components where Mr. Ramirez was killed.

Everybody kind of put a spotlight back

on that Jorge Ramirez case.

We were all watching the news and we were like,

"Oh, my God!"

And when they said on the news, you know,

they were putting informants in danger,

like that could be what happened to my brother.

Bakersfield Police Chief Greg Williamson

addressed concerns about police corruption today.

I remember we were all just mad.

This is exactly what we're talking about.

This department is corrupted.

After the corruption scandal was revealed,

there were increasing concerns about how informants

were handled by BPD officers, like Diaz and Mara.

But despite the scandal,

the department remained tight-lipped on the details.

Ramirez's family is now asking

whether Ramirez was a police informant

who was leading officers to Harger

through a deal that was brokered with the department.

On August 14, 2013,

a Bakersfield police officer named Lerry Esparza

searched Jorge's home,

a legal search that was a condition of Jorge's parole.

My brother just kept breaking his probation or parole.

I think it was really hard to go through

that short period of time

of the life he was living, that he wanted out.

He didn't want to go back to jail.

He was about to have a baby that he wanted to be there for.

Jorge was arrested by Officer Esparza

and taken into custody.

After the search warrant, on the way to jail,

Mr. Ramirez inquired that there's got to be

something he can do for me

to help make his case go away for him.

He did not want to go back to jail

and asked if there's anything that he could do

to help make this case go away.

My response was that,

if that was something he was willing to do,

we exchanged phone numbers and I said to give me a call

and we would move forward from there.

I was not part of the Jorge Ramirez case.

I was never there. I never met him.

I won't speak on anybody else,

but for me, personally,

I handled informants...

for many years, all the time.

Sometimes they were arrested

and, instead of being prosecuted,

they became an informant

and they had an obligation to work off their case.

In my heart, now, I believe that my son

was trying to just get this out of the way, you know.

"Just leave me alone!

Let me live my life!"

I showed him the confidential informant packet.

He didn't want to sign it.

He didn't want to put his fingerprint on it,

for fear that that information

might be somehow given to the public.

If you put out their name,

saying Joe Blow was an informant,

helping law enforcement, the criminal activity

around him and those that commit it

can be very vicious and vindictive.

You have a process established in your agency

that requires registration of your confidential informants.

Why? Because there has to be some level of documentation.

Officer Lerry Esparza

saw enough potential in Jorge as an informant

that he arranges a covert lunch

with one of BPD's then-rising stars,

Detective Patrick Mara.

I was aware that my partner, Patrick Mara,

had met with and knew Jorge Ramirez.

Pat himself told me that he knew him.

Patrick Mara was a very tough guy.

He was fearless.

He had brass cojones.

Detective Mara went over several case with Ramirez.

Detective Mara said those were all handled with informants

and he was just trying to get his point across

that informants are utilized all the time.

The information is not leaked.

He was just trying to gain some trust with Ramirez.

At the end of that meeting, Ramirez acknowledged

that he felt comfortable with Detective Mara.

Mara was intrigued enough

to delay one of Jorge's court appearances,

to give him a chance to prove

how valuable his information could be.

Ramirez had an upcoming court date

and, perhaps, that was the point of leverage

to be able to get the information that they wanted.

Patrick Mara says nothing came out of his plans

to use Jorge as a narcotics informant.

But in the days after their meeting,

Jorge thought he could provide police information

on the whereabouts of Justin Harger,

a dangerous criminal high on their most wanted list.

So, Chief, how was Jorge Ramirez then killed?

If he, as we understand, was not armed,

was he shot accidentally?

Well, I think the problematic issue in this case

is that Jorge Ramirez placed himself in this position.

We were responding to the flash and sound of gunfire

and returning fire at the same time,

so, it's quite possible

that Mr. Ramirez was shot at that time.

While not a registered confidential informant

that night, Jorge behaved as if he was

and probably never thought he'd lose his life

to the very same police he was providing information to.

Informants are human beings, just like you and me,

and we need to protect them.

This goes back to the lack of checks and balances.

Because of the decisions that they made,

they failed miserably.

Justice is what we want to--

I'm waiting to see the real story.

I'm waiting for them to expose to us

what really happened that night.

There's just so many turns and twists to it

that you go like, "Where's the truth now?

Where does it go from here?"

The discovery of text messages and phone calls

gave the Ramirez family a window

into what actually occurred the night Jorge died.

Calls and texts between Jorge and Officer Esparza began

around lunchtime.

Sometimes Esparza reaches Ramirez...

3pm - Esparza texts Ramirez.

3:03pm - Ramirez texts Esparza.

...and sometimes Ramirez can't reach Esparza.

At one point or another, we figured out

that my son was talking to an officer.

I honestly didn't even know my brother was talking

with Lerry Esparza until the text messages.

The Bakersfield Police Department had been looking

for Justin Harger in relation

to a shooting investigation that they were working on.

Justin Harger, wanted as an armed shooting suspect.

Ramirez was was acting as an informant

and helping police that night.

In broken conversation

and missed calls and cut-off texts,

but was trying to lead police to Harger.

And then, just before 10:30,

Jorge Ramirez sends the text

that would set this tragedy in motion,

two simple words, letting the police know

the whereabouts of Justin Harger.