A moment, then gunfire: How an ICE shooting tore at the Central Valley

An FBI officer would later write that the agents already knew which car belonged to Mendoza Hernández because of “intelligence gathered prior to the operation.”

From their vehicles, the four agents watched the home, waiting for Mendoza Hernández to leave for work. 

A camera was watching them too. Mendoza Hernández’s fiancee, Cindy — who asked to use only her first name for fear of immigration repercussions — said in a news conference the week after the shooting that she and Mendoza Hernández had a security camera outside their home. After the shooting, she reviewed the footage and saw agents waiting outside.  

According to Cindy, Mendoza Hernández worked for a construction company that removes debris from structures in San Jose. It’s a two-hour drive from Patterson, a town of 25,000 — the same kind of commute countless others make every day from homes deep in the Central Valley to Bay Area jobs on the other side of the mountains. 

At 6:40 a.m., Mendoza Hernández pulled out of the driveway. The agents followed.  

They trailed him, heading west on Sperry Avenue, out of Patterson and toward the freeway. Just past Rogers Road, as he approached I-5, they pulled him over. 

Mendoza Hernández had never interacted with federal agents before, but he had been stopped by local police a week earlier, Cindy says, for a cracked windshield. 

California law prohibits local police from feeding information to ICE in most cases, but federal agents have access to interconnected databases that often are used by local law enforcement — such as when they check fingerprints for criminal records or scan a driver’s license for outstanding arrest warrants. 

The criminal complaint against Mendoza Hernández says ICE agents had obtained a photo of him prior to the operation. After they pulled him over, an agent could identify his “big ears” on sight. 

The ICE agents and Mendoza Hernández’s lawyers are all in agreement that Mendoza Hernández refused to get out of the car. “The conversation was going in circles,” one agent later told an FBI official. 

As the seconds passed, traffic flowed by, a few feet away. 

One eyewitness who spoke out after the shooting identified herself only as Christina, out of fear of harassment because she had already been targeted for being involved in the case. She was a few car lengths behind Mendoza Hernández’s Toyota at the street curb. It was “a weird spot” to pull someone over, she would say later, because it is near a busy freeway onramp. 

As she approached the three cars stopped on the side of the road, Christina said she saw agents fanning out around the Toyota. 

“One of the agents started hitting the front windshield,” she said. 

“During the encounter, agents also informed Mendoza Hernández that they may have to break the window of his vehicle and extract him out of the vehicle,” an affidavit from the FBI investigator reads. After an officer shattered the front passenger window, the agents on the other side of the car — one leaning over the windshield and another at the driver’s window — pulled their weapons.

And then, the critical second and a half.

Video of the incident captured on the dashboard camera of a passing car, published by KCRA-TV on YouTube, shows a mountain of replays at this specific moment, as viewers try to parse the sequence of events. 

The Toyota’s wheels turn left, then the car rocks forward before accelerating backward, curving out from between the agents’ cars. 

The federal government’s case rests on the fact that the agent at the windshield was in the path of the vehicle when it lurched forward. “Based on my training and experience, and after reviewing relevant video evidence from the encounter, I believe that if Agent 1 had not moved, he/she would have been struck by Mendoza Hernández and would have suffered serious bodily injury or death,” the FBI agent wrote. “I believe agents discharged their firearms in response to Mendoza Hernandez driving his vehicle striking Agent 1.”

But Patrick Kolasinski, one of Mendoza Hernández’s lawyers, said his client was “adamant” that he was shot prior to moving the car, and that he drove in an attempt to flee further gunfire.

The video has no sound, so it is impossible to hear when the first agent fired at Mendoza Hernández. 

Christina, the eyewitness, initially told CNN that the Toyota first began to move, and then she heard several gunshots in quick succession. In a news conference several days after the incident, she said reviewing the video from her own dashcam had brought back a clearer memory of the events. There was one gunshot, and then the Toyota moved, and then she heard the rest of the shots, she said. 

The criminal complaint also notes one shot, a brief pause and more shooting. The complaint states that the car moved forward and the first shot happened “around this time,” not clarifying which occurred first. 

In Monday’s court hearing, David Hitt, the federal public defender representing Mendoza Hernández, said if the car was in neutral and then shifted into reverse, it could have caused the rocking movement forward seen in the video. 

But Drozd said the movement of the Toyota’s wheels to the left prior to the bump forward indicated Mendoza Hernández intended to flee the scene before he was shot, so even if he did not intend to harm the agents, he was “taking extraordinary measures to evade apprehension,” the judge said.

“His flight in this case was to save his own life,” Hitt argued, noting that the agents’ guns were already drawn. 

After that first gunshot, Christina watched from her car as Mendoza Hernández’s Toyota swung out from between the ICE agents’ vehicles, the front passenger door crunching backward off its hinge. Agents fired at the car, and Christina says she “wanted to turn around, but there was nowhere to go.” She said that amid the gunshots, an officer “was pointing his firearm at the traffic.”

The officers were also pointing their firearms at each other. The criminal complaint notes that at least one of the ICE agents chose not to shoot because of a “crossfire situation.”

Mendoza Hernández was shot at least six times, according to Kolasinski, and drove over the median into oncoming traffic. He collided with another vehicle under a nearby overpass and rolled to a stop, at which point the ICE agents succeeded in handcuffing him. Kolasinski said one of his arms “had bones sticking out” when he was taken into custody.

The criminal complaint states that the ICE agents “rendered first-aid,” but Kolasinski said Mendoza Hernández told him he did not receive any medical attention until paramedics arrived at the scene. 

Mendoza Hernández was transported to Doctors Medical Center in Modesto, where he underwent four surgeries over several days and was hospitalized in the intensive care unit. Protests outside the hospital on the evening after the shooting, in which dozens demanded justice for Mendoza Hernández, resulted in multiple arrests for vandalism.

Above: Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernández with fiancee Cindy, at a baby shower for their now-2-year-old daughter. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Kolasinski)