A Puerto Rico policeman, Guarionex Candelario Rivera, is in custody after fatally shooting two superior officers and a colleague on Monday. A police spokeswoman told the Associated Press that Rivera took the three police officers hostage before killing them in an office at the station in Ponce.
A 19-year-veteran of the Puerto Rico Police, Officer Candelario, 50, had been on medical leave for about a year and a half, having been forced to surrender his weapon on account of psychological issues, a police spokesman, Sgt. Axel Valencia, said at a news conference.
According to the New York Times, Candelario was deemed fit for duty about two years ago. “The same psychologists recommended to the police that he was ready to be armed again,” Valencia said. “The Police Department does not rearm any police officer until they have gone through the proper protocol: a medical exam or psychological exam. Obviously, the police personnel are stunned by what happened, shocked, saddened.”
At around 9:30 am on Monday, Valencia said, Candelario arrived at police headquarters in Ponce and asked for a meeting with personnel supervisors.From the Times:
Shortly afterward, Officer Candelario shot and killed the precinct commander, Frank Román; a personnel lieutenant, Luz M. Soto, 49, a 23-year veteran of the department who recently passed an exam to become a captain; and Rosario Hernández, 42, a uniformed officer who had worked there for 15 years, the police said. The two higher-ranking victims worked in the administrative division and did not supervise the suspect, the police said.Department officials confirmed that Officer Candelario was under guard Monday night while hospitalized for multiple gunshot wounds sustained during the encounter.
“The aggressor is arrested and he’s in the hospital with a wounded right arm,” Puerto Rico Police Deputy Superintendent Col. Juan Rodriguez Davila said,according to the Washington Post. “The investigators think that he was shot by one of the officers who was killed.”
Police spokeswoman Mayra Ayala told the AP that Candelario, who worked in the anti-drug division, killed his hostages just as negotiations were about to start.
The Puerto Rico Police department—comparable to state police elsewhere in the U.S.—is in the midst of a 10-year federally mandated reform, after the Department of Justice found in 2011 that it was “broken in a number of critical ways.” Officers were accused of illegal killings, corruption, and other civil rights violations. In September, the Times reports, the FBI arrested 10 Puerto Rico Police officers, who were accused of stealing drugs and money.
Investigators have yet to determine a motive in Monday’s fatal incident.
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