A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
We have more details about the ICE officer who shot and killed a Colombian man in Maine on Monday. He's an Army veteran and a former police officer. Now, on paper, those qualifications might make him an ideal candidate for the job. But his ex-wife tells NPR's Vanessa Romo he's a violent person who never should've been given a gun. Vanessa has this report, which describes allegations of assault.
VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Ashley Brouillette and David Brouillette were only married for about a year and a half between 2007 and 2009. But she tells NPR...
ASHLEY BROUILLETTE: We had been together from age 13 to 20.
ROMO: So your entire childhood. You know him.
A BROUILLETTE: I know him.
ROMO: The 37-year-old has identified her ex-husband as the officer who fatally shot Johan Duran Guerrero four times during an attempted traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine. NPR reached out to David Brouillette for this story, but he did not return those messages. Ashley says the two of them haven't been in touch for months, but that changed on Wednesday when he called and asked for a favor.
A BROUILLETTE: He asked me to basically talk good in his character, not to talk bad about him. And I told him that I was not going to lie for him. He asked me not to talk about the abuse in our marriage, and I told him, again, I was not going to lie for him. I said, why did you do it? Did you do it? And he said, yes, it was me, yes, I was involved, but it was justified.
ROMO: He insisted he acted in self-defense, she says, a claim she doesn't believe based on the abuse she says she suffered at his hands.
A BROUILLETTE: He'd hit me, choke me. And there was an incident where we had been fighting, and I walked away, and I got in the shower. And he comes in with a gun and points it at me and tells me that he's going to blow my brains all over the bathtub.
ROMO: There are no police reports to corroborate this story. Ashley says she was trauma bonded to Brouillette and would always recant her story, even when she was the one to call the authorities. But there is a voicemail message. It's from November, when Ashley had filed a restraining order against Brouillette. It goes on for three minutes, and it ends with this threat.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DAVID BROUILLETTE: Do I think that you should have your [expletive] throat cuts or should have had them cut? Yep.
ROMO: She says what the world has seen of her ex-husband this week is the violent man she's been trying to warn others about for decades. When their marriage had collapsed and they were in the middle of a vicious divorce back in 2009, she says she reached out to Brouillette's platoon leader. He was with the Maine Army National Guard. She offered to fax over paperwork showing that he'd been diagnosed as having manic bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia. But they dismissed it as ravings of a bitter ex-wife, she says.
A couple years later, Brouillette was deployed to Afghanistan. He returned with post-traumatic stress disorder. She says that made her even more fearful of him. Then at the end of last year, when Brouillette first told Ashley he'd been hired by ICE, she didn't know what to make of it.
A BROUILLETTE: I honestly thought that he was being delusional. And I didn't believe it.
ROMO: An ICE spokesperson said the agency will not confirm or deny whether Brouillette was the ICE officer responsible for Duran Guerrero's death. They said that the ICE officer in question has, quote, "nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training." Ashley questions whether there was a background check. If there had been, they might've seen a trail of violence, like the time in 2022 when Ashley says Child Protective Services and the police were both called to his home after he threw his then 13-year-old daughter through a coffee table.
A BROUILLETTE: Through a glass coffee table. Yes.
ROMO: Now Ashley is distraught over this week's events, that someone has lost their life.
A BROUILLETTE: I feel like even though I tried to bring awareness to his mental health conditions before and I got ignored, that I really need to push and be heard now and hopefully prevent something like this from happening again.
ROMO: The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are overseeing the investigation into Duran Guerrero's killing.
Vanessa Romo, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOE HARVEY-WHYTE AND BOBBY LEE'S "PLAINSONG") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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