Phoenix Police Department
Audio By Carbonatix
On the night of June 26, three Phoenix police officers shot and killed 22-year-old Xavier Alexander Aguirre. The Phoenix Police Department said the officers killed him while responding to a 911 call about him fighting with his brother and then pulling a knife on his mom’s boyfriend.
On Friday, the Phoenix Police Department released its “critical incident briefing” on the shooting. The briefing consists of a video and an accompanying write-up, and includes 911 call audio, a photo of the knife and footage from three officers’ body-worn cameras. The department releases the briefings approximately two weeks after a critical incident, which includes a fatal shooting by an officer.
Phoenix New Times received longer versions of the body-cam footage and 911 call through a public records request. The nearly 35 minutes of footage and three-minute-long 911 call paint a fuller picture of what happened outside the house near 3500 W. Greenway Road that night.
The shooting
The 911 caller was a panicked woman. “I need police!” she told the dispatcher. “They’re fighting!” The woman said her brothers were fighting and that there were knives in the house.
“They’re breaking glass!” the caller said. “I need you guys now!”
“I do not need you yelling at me, I’m trying to get somebody out there” the dispatcher replied.
The caller began shouting “No!” at someone who was with her. “I need you now! Please, please, please!” she yelled, turning back to the dispatcher. “He has a knife!” She identified her brother, Xavier Aguirre, as the one with the weapon.
“He’s trying to stab my mom’s boyfriend!” the woman yelled, her voice sounding more panicked. “I need 911 now!”
The officers arrived at the house to find a man on the sidewalk and a woman by the front door.
“Where is he at?” yelled officer Edward Bojorquez as he hurried towards them. Both of her sons were inside, the woman clarified. Did he hurt anybody, officer Braxton Wolf asked. No, she replied.
“He’s right here in the back!” the man on the sidewalk yelled as Aguirre, a thin man wearing a white sleeveless shirt and plaid pajama pants, appeared at the gate.
“Don’t hurt him please!” the woman shrieked, as Aguirre ran toward the man on the sidewalk.
Bojorquez, Wolf and a third officer, Andrew De Santos, rushed after Aguirre. “Hey! Hey! Let me see your hands!” Bojorquez shouted. Aguirre ignored them. The three officers fired a volley of shots and Aguirre fell to the ground, a knife dropping out of his right hand.
The entire encounter lasted about 30 seconds.
Phoenix Police Department
The aftermath
“Nine-nine-eight, nine-nine-eight, nine-nine-eight, man is down, man is down,” Bojorquez radioed. Aguirre’s mom screamed. She rushed towards her son, who lay still in the street. De Santos intercepted her. The three officers yelled at her and the man to stay back.
“Drop the knife!” Wolf yelled at Aguirre, not realizing it had fallen from Aguirre’s hand.
“Knife’s over there!” Bojorquez responded.
The officers crowded around Aguirre, rolled him over and cuffed him. Bojorquez fetched a med-pack, gloved up and started tearing open bandage packages. More officers arrived and worked to try to stop the bleeding while they waited for help. They tossed blood-soaked bandages to the side.
While Aguirre’s mother sobbed on the sidewalk, they rehashed the shooting of the man they were working to keep alive.
“He charged,” Bojorquez said. “I didn’t know what was in his hand until it flipped out.”
The others agreed. It was “defense of a third party.” Aguirre had charged the other man.
“We had no time to fucking do anything,” someone said. They tried to figure out who shot.
“Me and Wolf did,” Bojorquez said. “I did too,” De Santos chimed in.
Bojorquez said he thinks he fired half a clip. “Because he still kept on charging,” he said.
The pool of blood underneath Aguirre grew.
Supervisors arrived. Around 8 minutes after the shooting, they separated De Santos, Bojorquez and Wolf from each other and Aguirre’s body. The body-cam footage ends there.
Clarissa Sosin
What’s next
Aguirre was the eighth person shot and killed by Phoenix police this year. Phoenix cops killed three people within a few days of each other in March.
The department killed 11 people last year, down from the previous two years. That’s significantly down from a high in 2018, when Phoenix cops killed nearly twice as many people, the most by any department in the country that year. However, 11 shooting deaths is still higher than many similarly-sized departments.
Wolf, De Santos, and Bojorquez have all been with the department for one year. Bojorquez does not appear in the department’s use of force databases, which track incidents starting in January 2018 and were most recently updated on July 1 of this year. Wolf appears five times, though none of the incidents were found to violate policy and only one involved a person with a gun. De Santos appears four times, all of which were found to be within policy. Neither officer used lethal force.
The department did not release the names of the other officers on the scene.
The shooting is being investigated by the Major Incidents Division of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will ultimately decide whether criminal charges are brought against the officers.
It’s also subject to an internal review by the Phoenix Police Department. Phoenix police’s policy on the use of deadly force says it is justified only when a “suspect is acting or threatening to cause death or serious physical injury to the employee or others,” and has the opportunity and “the means or instrumentalities to do so.” It also requires that de-escalation tactics “have been tried, have failed, or are determined to have not been feasible,” and that suspects be given “a reasonable opportunity to comply voluntarily.”
Have information about this story? Reach Clarissa Sosin on Signal at @csosin.27
