![]() ![]() An officer had climbed up and was pointing his gun at the Torreses’ house. When Aubol went into her back yard, she saw a rope dangling from her roof. The SWAT team’s Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck was parked in front of them. Aubol peeked through the shutters of her front window and saw ten officers lined up against a neighbor’s garage, next to the Torreses’ house. Stephen called a neighbor, Val Aubol, who lived across the street, to find out what she could see. Stephen called the three main hospitals in Albuquerque, but Christopher hadn’t been admitted to any of them. Stephen called a close friend on the force, who said that a person had been taken off in an ambulance earlier in the afternoon, at around two o’clock. When Stephen asked the police what had happened to Christopher, he was told only that there was an “ongoing criminal investigation.” Stephen offered to let the officers inside the house, but they refused. Because he found it overwhelming to spend too much time among people, he tried to do small, social errands, so as not to isolate himself. He said that he needed to “check up on them” he often cleaned their pool or drove them to the grocery store. Then he visited an elderly couple who lived two houses away. Two hours earlier, he had stopped by her office for lunch, as he did a few times a week. Renetta knew that the only person at home was the youngest of her three boys, Christopher, who was twenty-seven and had schizophrenia. “I kept looking her way, but she would not make eye contact with me,” Renetta said. Renetta saw the city’s attorney, who worked in the same building and on the same floor as she did, and the deputy chief of police, whom she’d known in graduate school. Stephen saw a police-union attorney, who defended officers when they were in trouble. There were nearly eighty officers and city officials on the street, many of whom they recognized. ![]() Renetta and Stephen found each other at the southern end of the street. “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” the officer said. When Renetta saw that the street was cordoned off with police tape, she tried to walk to her house, but an officer told her that she couldn’t enter the “kill zone.” “What do you mean ‘kill zone’?” Renetta asked. A colleague had heard her address repeated on the police radio, so her assistant pulled her out of a meeting. Stephen’s wife, Renetta, the director of human resources for the county, arrived a few minutes later, just after three o’clock. Two officers were driving a remote-controlled robot, used for discharging bombs, back and forth on the corner. Officers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests had circled his home, a sand-colored two-story house with a pitched tile roof. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street. He left work and drove to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. After nearly every death, the police announced that the person the officer had shot was violent, a career criminal, or mentally ill. ![]()
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