Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez

TRIP TO THE BORDER: Blog #5

BorderLinks Delegation:   Tucson to Nogales and Back

Participants: Anne-Marie Patrie, John Schneider, Steve Goering, Susan Ortman Goering,

March 11-14, 2013

The Second Day                                                                                         

Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez    

Submitted by Anne-Marie Patrie                                                            Sent: March 29

You probably haven’t heard of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez.  Our government agents aimed through the border fence into Mexico and shot and killed him.

 

Here is his picture:

Here’s the story:

Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was a 16 year old Mexican boy who was shot and killed by US Border Patrol Agents.   They shot him in a populated area of Nogales, Mexico, THROUGH the border fence, multiple times, with all but one of the bullets all entering his back.  Many more bullets were fired, some lodging in the building that houses a medical office and the residence for a doctor –yes, he was home surfing the Internet when the shootings occurred.    This happened in October of 2012, and the investigation by US Border Patrol is not yet complete.  There are video images of the fence and the circumstances that led to his killing, since this is a heavily patrolled and monitored area.  Yet these 4 ½ months later, there is no report. 

The story so far is that drug packages were brought over the fence by 2 men who climbed the fence.  As US Border Patrol moved in, the men dropped their drug packages and climbed back over the fence to Mexico.  At this point, with Border Patrol moving to apprehend the climbers, rocks were thrown over the fence, from Mexico, to repel the Border Patrol.  Border Patrol says that this is a common occurrence –drug traffickers hire anyone (or people are forced by drug traffickers, we don’t know) to throw rocks to distract Border Patrol.

Border Patrol considers rocks a deadly weapon, and in all honesty, in the right circumstances, they can be deadly.  The arrangement of the fence and landscape at the location of the shooting makes it extremely unlikely that the rocks could hit anything very far on the other side of the fence; the accuracy and force would be very limited.  At the site of the shooting, the border fence runs along a bluff, the street is 25 feet below the bottom of the fence; the fence itself is about 18 feet tall.  IF Jose Antonio was throwing rocks, he was throwing them over a vertical height of over 43 feet.   Imagine yourself trying to throw a rock over this high of a barrier – it would be all you could do just to get it to the vertical distance, and impossible to also have any significant horizontal distance.