An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer tied to a fatal Maine shooting was fast-tracked through vetting despite a troubled history, The New York Times reports.
The Times identifies David Brouillette, 38, as the officer who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, in Biddeford on July 13. His family recognized him in a photo from the scene, and his ex-wife and daughter said he told them he fired the shots. The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t confirmed his role. It says the driver tried to get away and the officer acted out of concern for the public, a version the Times says remains unsupported by evidence.
Brouillette got clearance to begin work Dec. 1 after an initial screening that had been loosened, a person familiar with his hiring told the paper. The hiring surge came under President Donald Trump’s administration. Two other people said he bypassed the agency’s full training course, in line with ICE’s practice of giving recruits with law enforcement experience a shorter online program. A backlog meant no one had examined his complete background report by the time of the shooting.
Drawing on court records and interviews, the Times says his two former wives alleged physical abuse in court filings, which he disputed. His mother said he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and hospitalized. The paper also found he told a family court he’d been a police officer in a Maine town whose chief says he was never hired.
Frank Wozniak, a former fire chief who accepted Brouillette as a volunteer firefighter in 2021, told The Times, “He was a loose cannon.”
Brouillette’s sister gave the Times emails from 2021 in which he attacked her Colombian-born partner, who was in the country legally, and disparaged his bloodline.
DHS rejected suggestions that its training or vetting is deficient. Brouillette declined to speak with the Times.
Both Maine’s attorney general and the DHS inspector general are investigating. The attorney for Durán Guerrero’s family, who is separately suing the government, said investigators told him the attorney general intends to announce his decisions before his term ends in December.
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