Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was 25 years old, from Bucaramanga, Colombia.
He drove for Spark, the delivery platform.
He came to the United States in 2023 to build something better for a daughter who was still a baby then, and who is three now.
His partner, Martha Karolina Rojas Alvarez, spoke publicly for the first time Thursday, fighting through tears and a translator, and said he did everything to see her happy — that he fulfilled their daughter Dulce’s every wish.
On the morning of July 13, at the corner of Pool and Hill streets in Biddeford, Maine, a federal agent fired six shots into his white Kia.
His daughter, wearing Bluey pajamas and a pink backpack, and her mother stood nearby in the aftermath, crying, while agents pulled him from the car.
He was not the man ICE was looking for.
This week, we learned who fired those shots — and that the government had a decade of warning.
The government wouldn’t name him, so his ex-wife did.
The agent is David Michael Brouillette, 37, of Manchester, Maine — an Army veteran and licensed real estate agent who joined ICE within the past year.
The Department of Homeland Security did not identify him.
It still hasn’t.
An ICE spokesperson told reporters the agency would never confirm or deny “attempts to dox our law enforcement officers” — a striking posture, given that Maine State Police and other local agencies routinely release the names of officers involved in shootings within days.
We know his name because his ex-wife told reporters.
Ashley Brouillette says he called her on a Facebook audio call shortly after the shooting and admitted he had killed Durán Guerrero.
She told the Portland Press Herald he asked her to lie for him and cover for his character, and that he sounded unusually calm.
Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison, told the AP her father called her Wednesday and said the same thing.
What was in the file
Brouillette has no criminal record in Maine — a check with the Department of Public Safety came back empty.
That is the fact DHS will hide behind.
It is also the reason the rest of this matters.
Because the record isn’t in the criminal system.
It’s in family court, and the Associated Press pulled hundreds of pages of it from the Augusta District Court clerk’s office: years of allegations of physical and verbal abuse, stalking, and harassment raised by his second ex-wife on behalf of herself and his daughters.
She alleged he tackled his teenage daughter and smashed spaghetti in her hair; that during another outburst he dragged her around the house as she cried.
She alleged he once told her she should have her throat cut.
Ashley Brouillette, his first wife, says she divorced him in 2009 after he became physically violent with her — violence she says began when she got pregnant.
His employment history has its own issues.
He was a corrections officer at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham for less than a year.
He worked twice for the volunteer fire department in Manchester and was removed both times — for shouting and refusing to follow a supervisor’s orders.
In fairness, the record cuts both ways, and honest reporting requires saying so.
Brouillette denied the allegations in court filings, saying his second ex-wife had slandered him.
The two of them have filed protection orders against each other over the past decade and fought a long post-divorce battle over child support.
And when she filed a fresh protection order request this Thursday — citing the Biddeford shooting, and stating that he keeps a gun and a crossbow at his home — a Kennebec County judge denied it, finding the allegations insufficient to show immediate danger.
Allegations are not convictions.
But that is precisely the point, and it is not a mitigating one: a hiring process worth the name exists to weigh exactly this kind of evidence — the pattern that never becomes a conviction.
ICE did not have to find him guilty of anything.
It had to open a file at a public courthouse in the state capital.
The vetting was the failure
This isn’t one bad hire. It’s the predictable yield of a system built for volume.
ICE has been racing to reach 10,000 new officers, powered by billions from Congress.
To fill the pipeline, it dangled signing bonuses up to $50,000, dropped the college requirement, and lowered the minimum recruit age to 18 with no age cap.
Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer who trained new deportation officers, told the AP the agency cut both the amount of training recruits get and the testing required to graduate.
DHS denies lowering any standards.
This is only one of several examples of people who are unfit to serve as ICE agents.
Remember the “death cards” ICE agents in Denver would leave behind when they detained someone?
NBC News reported that ICE dismissed more than 200 recruits during training for failing to meet its own requirements — and that some arrived at the academy without having submitted fingerprints for background checks at all.
Staff found one recruit previously charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse warned DHS in February that diluted standards plus extremist-coded recruiting make the agency a magnet for exactly the wrong applicants.
Sen. Dick Durbin raised the same alarm months before that.
ICE’s own defense is a tell.
The agency says the agent has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience and completed required use-of-force training.
Technically true — he policed for the VA starting in 2017. Also a dodge: he was an ICE rookie, and the “decade” is doing the work of a résumé nobody has actually defended.
The other problems with the shooting
- He wasn’t the target. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin first told Sen. Angus King that Durán Guerrero had “weaponized” his Kia and was wanted. By that afternoon, Mullin conceded he wasn’t the target of the warrant at all.
- His status is contested. ICE called him illegally present with a final removal order. His family’s attorney, Benjamin Gideon, says he was here legally. Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine say he had a valid work permit and a Social Security number. DHS’s own line is that work authorization isn’t legal status — a technicality, deployed after the fact, about a man who is dead.
- No body cameras. Congress appropriated $20 million for them. The agents in Biddeford weren’t wearing any, so there is no direct footage of the moments that killed him. Biddeford’s mayor called that unacceptable.
Where it stands
The FBI is leading the investigation.
Maine’s congressional delegation has demanded the DHS inspector general expedite it.
Sens. Warren and Markey say they’re profoundly alarmed.
Sen. Collins pressed Mullin to halt non-urgent vehicle stops — and ICE quietly paused most of them, until Trump pushed to reverse course. Colombian President Gustavo Petro called it murder, saying Durán Guerrero was killed because he was deemed an inferior being devoid of rights.
More than $100,000 has been raised to send his body home to his parents in Bucaramanga.
Every institution that could have stopped this had a chance.
The fire department that removed him twice.
The courthouse holding hundreds of pages.
The agency that skipped the fingerprints.
Instead, DHS handed him a badge, a gun, and no camera, and sent him to a residential street in Biddeford at seven in the morning — where a father of a three-year-old was driving to work.
