Just another day in Texas........
Texas Bounty Hunter Shootout Kills 3, Raising Questions
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
JUNE 1, 2017
The two bounty hunters had their guns drawn as they entered a small, glass-enclosed office in a Texas car dealership on Tuesday. “Back up!” they shouted before trying to tackle a man in a baseball cap sitting at a desk. Gunfire rang out — about 20 shots in six seconds, officials said. Customers and employees ran for cover.
Within minutes the three men were dead from multiple gunshot wounds, according to city officials in Greenville, Tex. The two bounty hunters — Gabriel Bernal, 33, and Fidel Garcia Jr., 54 — were private investigators, hired to serve a warrant for the arrest of the third man, Ramon M. Hutchinson, 49, who was wanted in Minnesota on drug charges.
The episode, captured in a video and recordings of 911 calls that were released by city officials on Wednesday, drew further attention to the work of so-called bounty hunters, a job that pits freelance law enforcement figures against fugitives in ways that have sometimes operated outside of conventional policing methods and local oversight.
The police and officials in Greenville, a city of about 25,000 people in North Texas, distanced themselves from the fatal encounter. A statement from the city on Wednesday described it as an “unfortunate and tragic incident” in which “three outsiders crossed paths.”
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Sgt. Adam Phillips, a Greenville Police Department spokesman, said in an email on Thursday, “Those individuals do not work for and are not associated with any police department, especially NOT the Greenville Police Department.”
nytimes.com
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