A week after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 on April 24, a Pinal County deputy was shot in the desert about 50 miles south of Phoenix. The deputy, Louie Puroll, said he stumbled upon a group of immigrants hauling marijuana on April 30, and during a running gun battle he was shot by one of them with an AK47, before they fled on foot. Here's how the story was reported that evening on the local news.
The case received quite a bit of national airplay because the entire nation was gripped in "papers please" fever that week, debating the Arizona law on nearly every news outlet. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a Joe Arpaio wannabe, became the darling of some of the looniest rightwing media for a while, using the incident to justify SB 1070. Soon, Senator John McCain, needing to prove his anti-Mexican credibility to the wingnuts who were supporting his Senate primary opponent, J.D. Hayworth, tapped the bullet-headed Babeu to appear with him in the "build the dang fence" TV ad.
Several critics noted at the time that the ad features Babeu and McCain walking along the border fence near Nogales in Santa Cruz County, while Babeu's jurisdiction, Pinal County, is more than 60 miles from the border. On top of that, the actual sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Tony Estrada, has been a vocal opponent of SB 1070 – correctly pointing out that crime is lower along the border than it's been in years, that immigration itself has also declined, and that enforcing SB 1070 will strain his budget and take deputies away from preventing and solving more serious crimes.
But that didn't matter to McCain, Babeu, and Governor Brewer, who used the deputy's shooting as an example of how dangerous it is in the Arizona desert. Brewer mentioned the story in her ads and public appearances, where she made Arizona look like a war zone, famously (and incorrectly) saying there were even beheadings in the desert. Deputy Puroll himself remained out of sight, but Babeu, Joe Arpaio, and other SB 1070 defenders didn't shy away from exploiting the deputy's story.
After many of the anti-SB 1070 protests died down and McCain easily dispatched Hayworth, we didn't hear much about the Pinal County shooting ... until last Thursday, when New Times printed a long investigative report based on forensic evidence, telephone records, and just plain commonsense that questioned the deputy's account. According to retired homicide detective Weaver Barkman, who analyzed the evidence for New Times:
"Deputy Puroll's claims and versions are not supported by the physical, anecdotal, and behavioral evidence that I have reviewed. Several claims are in direct conflict with the physical evidence."
Okay, it's New Times, that liberal rag that hates Arpaio, so after the story appeared some people probably dismissed it as just another hit job on the state's crazy-ass politicians and law officials. But then, someone in the MSM actually did their job and looked into report's findings. Over the weekend the Arizona Republic printed several articles about the inconsistencies in the deputy's story, and several local TV stations ran segments that actually took the New Times article seriously.
And then today we learned:
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu announced Monday that he is reopening the investigation into the April shooting of a deputy and asking the state Department of Public Safety to conduct lab tests on the shirt Louie Puroll was wearing when he purportedly was wounded during an exchange of gunfire with drug smugglers.
Now, none of us knows what happened out there in the desert – one reason being that the crime scene investigation was pretty sloppy. But clearly things smelled a little fishy from the get-go, as Paul Rubin writes in New Times.
[T]he sheriff conceded that some information released by his agency in the hours after the incident was inaccurate:
• That Puroll faced at least 30 rounds of gunfire during the shoot-out. He didn't.
• That more than one helicopter had come under fire in the desert before Puroll was rescued. None had.
• That the smugglers left behind "bales" of marijuana as they fled. Authorities confiscated no contraband.
Watch that TV report I linked to earlier; almost every detail mentioned in the story is wrong. Other inconsistencies: The phone records and office dispatches don't match the accounts given by Deputy Puroll and others at the County office. Also, although more than 200 officers took part in the search, on foot and in helicopters, no trace of the smugglers was found, even though there is literally nowhere for them to go or hide. Most glaringly, forensic experts say that the shot Puroll suffered could not have happened as he said.
On the radio call that ran on Fox and other news outlets, we hear Puroll say, "I've been hit," and he later said he was shot by an AK47 from about 25 yards away. Trouble is, two forensic experts who analyzed photographs of the wound and the deputy's shirt doubt the wound happened that way. According to Dr. Michael Baden of the New York State Police Medicolegal Investigation Unit,
"I don't see what the problem is in calling this a close-contact wound. I don't know who did it, but the weapon was either touching this man or was within a couple of inches. It's pretty straightforward. It clearly is not a shot from a distance."
As of tonight, Sheriff Babeu is still defending his deputy, although media pressure has forced him to reopen the investigation and call for more studies, especially of Puroll's shirt, which has never been examined. Fox News reports tonight:
Even though forensic specialists say the photo evidence does not add up, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is sticking behind his deputy's account that he was ambushed and shot at in the desert by drug smugglers.
Many people have offered theories about why Puroll might invent this story, if in fact he did – everything from covering up an accidental shooting of himself to being in cahoots with the smugglers. That's one story, and people will continue to speculate. What we don't have to speculate about is the way politicians and others have exploited the story to support SB 1070, just as they did the shooting of rancher Robert Krentz, although we still don't know what happened there either.
Brewer, McCain, Arpaio and the other usual suspects are not above using indecisive evidence and outright lies about desert decapitations to support their bigoted agenda – it's the facts about immigration that they have a problem with.