Lawmakers including Rep. Maxine Waters and Nanette Diaz Barragán of California are demanding an investigation into the fatal police shooting of an 18-year-old Latino man in Los Angeles last week. Andrés Guardado was shot and killed outside a body shop where he worked as a security guard, after police claimed that he reached for a gun and then ran. But family said he wasn’t known to have a gun, and that 18-year-old likely ran because he was scared.
Circumstances around the shooting remain unclear because Waters and Diaz Barragán wrote police involved weren’t wearing body cams. Guardado, a student at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, was reportedly shot in the back. The lawmakers called on the state’s attorney general Xavier Becerra to open an immediate investigation into the killing. “Far too often, young Brown and Black men are caught up in a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ scenario with police officers,” they said. “We will not stand for it whether it is in Atlanta, or like this case, in South Los Angeles.”
Claims supporting the “shoot first, ask questions later” scenario are backed by local residents like Georgena Laird, who told the Associated Press that she “didn’t hear them say ‘stop, freeze,’ no nothing,” KTLA said. “Laird described Guardado as a ‘sweetheart’ and said he would offer her money or bring her juice and soda when her husband was in the hospital.” In a large parade and protest over the weekend, outraged community members, some holding “Justice for Andres Guardado” signs, called on police to release any footage relating to the shooting.
In an emotional speech drifting from Spanish to English, Guardado’s father, Cristobal, told the crowd that his son “was a good boy.” In the background, a supporter could be heard yelling, “we want justice!” Immigrant rights advocate and author Julissa Natzely Arce Raya tweeted that she’d spoken to Cristobal, who said that the 18-year-old had been working “because he wanted to pay for his car, but also because his dad works in the restaurant business and was hard hit by Covid-19.”
“Cristobal told me that he hadn’t felt comfortable letting Andres work so far from their home in K-town, but Andres told his dad to trust him. ‘I don’t drink or anything papa, please let me help you,’” Arce Raya continued. She wrote that Cristobal said, “What the cops did to my son is not right. He was just a kid, starting his life. After they took him from us they left his body on the floor until 5 am, and they wouldn’t even let us see him. I am his papa.”
As has been seen at protests against police violence across the country, law enforcement also fired “indiscriminately at protesters from a far,” L.A. Taco continued.
Other national lawmakers and leaders calling for an immediate probe into Guardado’s killing included Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro. Guardado “deserves justice,” tweeted the caucus chair. “Why was deadly force used? We need an immediate, independent investigation—not led by police—with full transparency and accountability. Black people and Latinos are being killed by a shoot-first, question-later culture that must be stopped.”
“Change must come now,” Waters and Diaz Barragán continued in their statement. “For weeks, the American people and the world have marched to demand accountability, put an end to aggressive and violent police tactics, and equal justice for Black and Brown communities. We must show them their pleas are being heard. Now. That begins with making sure we get justice for Andres Guardado.”