The video starts out as boring as interstate driving. Cars and trucks zoom by on Interstate 10 under a spacious New Mexico sky on a bright February day, captured on a state trooper's dashcam.
About 90 seconds later, Officer Darian Jarrott is pulling over a white pickup. His lapel bodycam is on as he approaches the vehicle nonchalantly, greeting the driver from the passenger side with "Good afternoon, sir."
Officer Jarrott doesn't realize it, but those words kick off a countdown. He has exactly three minutes to live once he speaks. Much of that time is spent on the pullover drill: asking about the truck's temporary tags, driver's license, insurance.
The bodycam is too low to see inside the truck, but the face of the driver appears eerily in the door-mounted review mirror as he talks with the trooper, and gives his name as Omar Cueva. There is a foreboding hesitancy in Cueva's replies as Jarrott asks him several times to exit the truck and come back to the patrol vehicle to complete paperwork.
The view switches back to the dashcam as the driver's door opens, and Jarrott says, "Hey, hey, real quick, that firearm"--the sound of wind obscures the audio, then Jarrott continues--"you mind if I take it off you, for my safety?"
There is no alarm in his voice at spotting a weapon, or apparent concern as he gestures toward his vehicle, says "Come on," and glances away from the driver to start walking back to it.
But as Cueva steps out, holding an AR-style rifle, he pauses and subtly racks the slide, out of view from the officer. Suddenly, without word or warning, he raises the gun to shoulder level, points it across the truck bed at Jarrott and fires two shots.
Jarrott ducks and drops onto his back, and attempts to draw his own weapon as he rolls away, but Cueva bounds around the back of the truck and shoots eight times in rapid succession as the officer collapses. He then runs up, puts the barrel point-blank at Jarrott's head and fires a final, fatal shot before fleeing.
The state trooper was only 28 years old, with three young children and a pregnant wife at home.
For most people, traffic stops are minor annoyances. The average driver is guilty only of speeding or some other moving vehicle infraction. He or she represents virtually no threat to anyone, including the police officer who pulled them over. An impaired driver, who may have been swerving or driving erratically, might be less courteous but generally is not a risk, either.
But for a criminal, a traffic stop can be a major crisis. Drivers with long criminal histories or violent pasts or, especially, firearms violations (like Cueva had) represent a supreme risk, which is heightened even more because of the routine nature of traffic stops. Police pull over more than 20 million cars a year in the U.S.
A criminal might be in transit while in the middle of something illegal at the moment he gets pulled over (as Cueva was). He may be recently released from prison, and harboring seething hostility at the system that stripped him of his liberty (Cueva had told an undercover officer he wasn't going back to prison).
All too often, law enforcement officers enacting a traffic stop have no idea which case scenario on the spectrum of possibilities they're walking into as they approach a vehicle.
In April, Jarrott's widow initiated a wrongful-death lawsuit against the state of New Mexico and Homeland Security Investigations for not sharing information about Cueva with her husband. State police have acknowledged that their officers were assisting Homeland Security in executing a sting operation, but said another trooper with backup, not Jarrott, was assigned to pull Cueva over that day. Whether Jarrott acted on his own or was told by superiors to pull the white pickup over will likely be a matter for the courts to decide.
As hard as it is to watch, the video offers a couple of crucial context considerations for modern crime-fighting that law-abiding citizens are prone to forget.
The speed at which a seemingly routine police encounter like a traffic stop can turn deadly is incredibly fast. Within four seconds of stepping out of his truck, Cueva fires twice. For all of us whose jobs never require that we confront dangerous criminals, that should motivate us to understand that officers may have no time to react when things turn south, so they must pick up on warning signals to stay alive.
Behavior that might seem innocuous to us as non-criminals--refusing to show our hands, or get out of our car--can be an escalating red flag to police.
A cop is shot and killed, on average, every week. A 2016 study of 1,926 law enforcement agencies found the frequency of firearm assaults against police to average more than six times per day--every four hours--and far more frequent in some jurisdictions.
Nothing excuses criminal police misconduct. But as citizens, we must remember that our behavior can play a critical role in tragic mistakes police might make.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.