EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Two police officers are dead, another is recovering from a gunshot wound and a state commander’s vehicle is all shot up in what Mexican authorities say were unrelated events in Juarez on Monday night.
The attacks against the officers capped one of the bloodiest Mondays on record in the city across the border from El Paso, with a total of 14 murders.
Police stations in Juarez went on “red alert” after the killing of a municipal police commander and the abduction of a relative from a grocery store in southeast Juarez.
“We had a report at 8 p.m. of a man shot to death in a home in Salvacar. The family confirmed it was a police officer who was under suspension,” Chihuahua Deputy Attorney General Jorge Nava said in a news conference.
He did not identify the victim, but Juarez news reports said the man was Román Favela Barraza, who was suspended from the police force for unspecified reasons a year ago.
Nava said city and state police officers went looking for the abduction victim and zeroed in on a vehicle after hearing gunshots and finding the man’s body on the street.
A rolling gunfight took place along Las Torres avenue in south Juarez resulting in the deaths of three alleged triggermen, Nava said.
A short time later, municipal police officers fired on a “suspicious” blue Chevrolet Tahoe. The vehicle was carrying State Police Commissioner Ricardo Realivazquez and his bodyguards. The vehicle is armored, and the police commissioner escaped injury. Nava said the shooting was accidental.
An audio recording of the aftermath of the shooting, shared on social media, has Realivazquez shouting insults at the city cops that fired on him.
At 11 p.m. a municipal policewoman was shot in the hand outside a downtown Juarez meat shot and at 11:40 another municipal officer was shot to death outside a home in the Obregon neighborhood.
Nava said there’s no evidence these were coordinated attacks against police or that a single criminal organization was responsible for them.
Juarez has now recorded more than 650 homicides in 2021, according to the nonprofit Citizens Observatory.
