More to the story than originally revealed.
It still doesn't make sense that the deputy had him up front and unrestrained.
PEARSALL — In the year after Andres “Andy” Gutierrez got into his first altercation with a Frio County sheriff's deputy, the 19-year-old could not stop obsessing about the incident.
Gutierrez's father said the deputy beat his son in May 2007 for refusing to take a drug test at a probation office, but county officials say the force was justified because the man was combative.
On Monday — more than a year after what authorities and his family said was his first encounter with Deputy Roger Salinas — Gutierrez was shot and killed inside Salinas' patrol vehicle on a San Antonio freeway.
Salinas, 36, said he had no choice but to shoot Gutierrez because the man attacked him. Gutierrez, being driven to a psychiatric hospital, wasn't wearing handcuffs and was riding in the front seat.
“Roger Salinas was the last person who should have taken my son to the hospital,” said the father, Ascension Gutierrez.
Salinas could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
On Monday, Gutierrez had visited the Camino Real Community MHMR Center, a county mental health clinic. Officials and family said he made numerous calls to the agency's crisis hot line over the weekend because he was suffering from paranoid delusions.
After clinic staff authorized his request to be committed to a psychiatric hospital, County Judge Carlos A. Garcia authorized a warrant for a sheriff's deputy to transport him.
“When he wasn't feeling well, he would come into my office and ask to be committed,” Garcia said. “He was a very mellow, very kind of shy person.”
Officials said Salinas was the deputy chosen to transport the psychiatric patient from the clinic to San Antonio because no one else was available.
Gutierrez didn't say or do anything to indicate he feared Salinas when the deputy escorted him into the vehicle, officials said.
“My staff indicated he left cooperatively and very calmly,” said Emma Garcia, executive director of Camino Real Community MHMR Centers. “There wasn't any resistance or any problem at all.”
Garcia's agency is the primary mental health service for a nine-county region in South Texas. Because the counties do not have psychiatric hospitals, patients with serious symptoms are taken to San Antonio facilities such as Laurel Ridge Hospital, which was Gutierrez's destination.
Ascension Gutierrez said his son's mental health deteriorated just three years ago, after he was nearly stabbed to death by a 52-year-old man in his neighborhood.
The assailant, Mucio Martinez, pleaded guilty in 2006 and was sentenced to six years in state prison.
“After that, he wasn't the same boy,” said his aunt, Lupe Gutierrez.
Before the knife attack, which sent him to a hospital for two weeks with multiple wounds to his chest and hands, Andres Gutierrez was a good student who excelled on the Pearsall High School track team, his family said. His father has a small collection of medals for his cross-country competitions and long-distance races.
Memories of the 2005 attack by Martinez haunted Gutierrez. He had violent night terrors. Trips to the county clinic became more frequent. He dropped out of school during his senior year in 2007.
In December 2006, Gutierrez was arrested and charged with possessing less than 2 ounces of marijuana, was fined and received probation, records show.
In May 2007, while he and his father made his first visit with a probation officer, Gutierrez refused to take a drug test. After probation officers couldn't convince him to take the test, deputies, including Salinas, were called to the scene.
What followed, according to the father, was a beating so severe that his son had bruises all over his body, including his groin area, for many weeks afterward.
“Salinas took my son into another room and closed the door, then I just heard my boy screaming,” said Ascension Gutierrez, who was arrested and charged with assaulting a peace officer after he tried to intervene for his son.
Sheriff Lionel Treviño said the Gutierrez family's perception of the incident does not mesh with what deputies told him.
“There was nothing that could even be considered a beating,” Trevino said. “These people are ... I don't want to go out on a limb, but I was born and raised here and ... there was no beating.”
The younger Gutierrez, like his father, was charged with assaulting a peace officer. The assault charges, however, quickly were dropped. Soon after the incident, the county judge issued an order terminating Gutierrez's probation for the marijuana charge.
His family thinks the dismissals were compensation for the beating. Ascension Gutierrez never filed a formal complaint.
“We were so afraid that I just said, ‘Andy, we have to forget about this,'” the father said.
But his son couldn't forget. Like the 2005 stabbing, he rehashed the incident daily, over and over again.
“He rarely had a good day,” Lupe Gutierrez said.
The Sheriff's Office and the district attorney's office never conducted an investigation.
The San Antonio Police Department is investigating Monday's shooting because it happened here, in the 10900 block of Interstate 35 South.
According to a police report, at about 3:15 p.m. Salinas tried but failed to subdue Gutierrez with a Taser, so the deputy grabbed his service weapon and shot him in his arm and chest. Gutierrez died at the scene.
When police arrived, Salinas had a bruised right eye, swelling around both eyes and head trauma, according to the police report. He was taken to University Hospital in fair condition and later released.
Gutierrez was not restrained and rode in the front seat of a Frio County vehicle that did not have a police cage. Frio County Chief Deputy Joel Arellano said Gutierrez did not have to be restrained because he was classified as a “patient” instead of an “inmate,” and by seating the patient in front, the deputy could better watch him.
“Common practice is if you have a vehicle with no cage, a person riding in the back with a seatbelt and no restraints is a lot more dangerous,” Arellano said.
Still, Frio County's mental health officials said deputies reserve the right to detain patients. Ascension Gutierrez said clinic employees told him Salinas had advised them he planned to handcuff the young man, but that never happened.
In death, he hopes his son found what he needed most in life.
“All my son ever wanted was justice,” the father said.
