Less Than a Minute

On September 12, two Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stopped Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a thirty-eight-year-old Mexican immigrant, on a busy street in Franklin Park, Illinois, less than a minute after he had dropped off his two sons at an elementary school and a day care. Less than a minute after the stop, Villegas-Gonzalez was shot in the neck and his Subaru had crashed into a truck more than a hundred feet down the road. The Department of Homeland Security said he had hit and dragged one of the officers with his car, “seriously injuring” him; the officer had fired in self-defense. Villegas-Gonzalez was unarmed and had no criminal record beyond traffic offenses.

A New York Times reconstruction, drawing on multiple surveillance feeds, the officers’ body cameras, and bystander video, calls two specific elements of that account into question: the recordings do not show Villegas-Gonzalez striking either officer with the vehicle, and on his own body camera in the immediate aftermath one of the officers describes his injuries as “nothing major.” The reconstruction does not resolve every question about the encounter; it does demonstrate, frame by frame, that the official narrative — a self-defense killing of a man who had seriously injured a federal officer — is not supported by the recordings the federal officers themselves made.