MODESTO — No one disputes that Alberto Sepulveda was doing exactly as he was told in the seconds after a police SWAT team burst into his family's home early on the morning of Sept. 13.
As officers rounded up his father, mother and brother, the 11-year-old quickly complied with orders to lie face down, arms outstretched, on the floor beside his bed.
Less than 30 seconds later, in what police describe as a tragic accident, he was struck in the back and killed by a blast from a shotgun trained on him by a Modesto special weapons and tactics officer.
The boy's death, while his father was being served with a federal arrest warrant in a drug trafficking case, sent shock waves through this Central Valley city, roiling its large, established Latino community and throwing its Police Department--and its new police chief--on the defensive.
Under investigation by the state attorney general, the Stanislaus County district attorney and the Police Department itself, the case has raised numerous questions, from why agents chose to arrest Moises Sepulveda at his home to why pre-raid surveillance had not discovered that children were likely to be present.
For many, though, the issue is a broader one: Why was the SWAT team there at all?
"Why all these paramilitary tactics, this whole ninja way of breaking into somebody's home to serve a warrant?" asked Michael Garcia, a leader of the Modesto chapter of the American GI Forum, a Latino veterans group that has been outspoken in the case. "It's like a police state--not something I ever thought I'd see in my country."
Academics such as Peter Kraska, a criminologist who has studied the growing use of SWAT teams in cities across the country, echo Garcia's concern.
The fatal raid, Kraska said, highlights a troubling trend--the tendency of law enforcement agencies to rely on paramilitary police units to execute warrants in drug cases. Such an approach is risky and often unnecessary, he said.
He and others cite a string of controversial incidents involving the military-style squads:
* The fatal shooting in September 1999 of Denver resident Ismael Mena, 45, by SWAT team members who forced their way into what turned out to be the wrong house.
* The 1996 death of Larry Harper, an Albuquerque resident who was despondent and threatening to kill himself as SWAT officers, summoned by his family, arrived and shot him to death. The city's SWAT team was dismantled after his shooting.
