Near dusk on Wednesday, Jan. 19, city police officer Reid Gunter spotted 23-year-old Francisco Barva riding a mini-motorcycle near the intersection of Thorp and Gypsy on the city's impoverished south side. Just an hour earlier, Gunter and another officer had approached Barva and several friends at a house on the 300 block of Gypsy Street and warned them the scooter was not "street legal," according to a police report. The officers warned the men they would be cited if they were caught riding the bike on the street again. Seeing the lanky Barva, a Mexican immigrant who struggled with English, riding the minibike again, Gunter, 24, activated his patrol car lights and pursued Barva onto Gypsy, trying to make him stop. A few chaotic minutes later, Barva, who was carrying a gun, lay on the street dying. Gunter had shot him in the head. In a city where the police department has been subjected to numerous lawsuits in recent years alleging discriminatory treatment of blacks and Hispanics, the case has stirred feelings of mistrust and raised questions about how the case is being handled. At least four people who say they witnessed the shooting have questioned the preliminary version of events from law officers— that Barva first pointed a handgun at Gunter before sustaining the fatal shot. While the investigation was only a day old, and before all eyewitnesses had been independently interviewed, Bohn publicly said he believed Gunter had properly followed protocol leading to his use of deadly force. Meanwhile, the four witnesses who said they did not see Barva threaten Gunter with a handgun were not interviewed by sheriff's detectives until nine days after the shooting. An officer chasing Barva said he saw the suspect toss a shiny object as he ran from police after the Dec. 8 shoplifting incident. Three days later, a local resident discovered a .22-caliber handgun believed to be Barva's in his front yard. But a fingerprint analysis was not able to match the gun to Barva, according to reports.
Shooting Officer has Troubled Past
Officer Gunter has found himself under scrutiny for his conduct as a law officer. He has been the subject of three citizen complaints alleging excessive use of force since January 2002. Internal investigations cleared him in all three cases, Bohn said. Two of those cases involved using physical force to subdue suspects and one involved pointing a weapon during a traffic stop at motorists who reportedly shot at citizens.He was one of five Hobbs police officers highlighted in 2003 court documents filed by plaintiffs in the follow-up to the 1999 class-action discrimination lawsuit. The court documents said that Gunter was one of five officers who, in the third and fourth quarters of 2002, accounted for 40 percent of all the times that Hobbs officers used force against the public. "This is ... a disturbingly high figure for only five out of approximately 80 HPD officers," according to a footnote in the document filed by attorneys Daniel Yohalem and Richard Rosenstock. Gunter alone was involved in 22 use-of-force incidents— or 5.1 percent— of the 427 total force cases generated by the department's roughly 70 officers during 2003 and 2004, police records show. In Gunter's 22 use-of-force cases in the past two years, he drew or pointed his firearm in four cases, according to HPD. Gunter did not discharge his weapon in those cases. [more] and
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