So I had just completed my 45-minute evening swim, covering almost a mile, and changed back into my street clothes. Then I stopped on my way home at the Von’s grocery store at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Seaward Avenue to pick up some parmesan cheese for my older daughter Julia, as well as a few other items. An evening swim and the grocery store is not an uncommon routine for me. I made my purchases and left the store.
It was approximately 7:25 pm and I was back in my car getting ready to drive home. The parking lot was dark. I had started my audiobook on my car speakers — “Can I See Your Hands, A Guide to Situational Awareness, Personal Risk Management, and Security,” by Gav Schneider, ironically enough — when I noticed a small flotilla of police cars with lights and sirens on driving southbound on Harbor Blvd about a 100 yards to my front and right. They were travelling slowly, as if it were some slow-speed pursuit; I learned later the police were following a car whose tires had been blown out. Then the entire caravan stopped and I heard a quick succession of 5-6 gunshots.
Then silence.
Whatever gunfight had started, it seemed to have ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
I got out of my car and looked around a bit. Then I got back in my car and got out of there. I pulled up an EMS services scanner app I have on my iPhone which I use about two times per year when there is obviously some big police or fire activity going on near me. I heard one officer on the Ventura Police frequency claim they had recovered the suspect’s gun at the scene. They requested the “bearcat” vehicle to examine the suspect’s car to see if anyone else was inside.
I drove to the Seaward entrance ot the southbound 101 Freeway and got on the freeway. As I drove down the onramp I could see in the darkness a couple of cops on Harbor Blvd. crouching around a figure on the ground, and unless I was very much mistaken they were doing CPR on him. I heard the police request that someone close the freeway entrance I had just used.
I knew the “suspect” was dead. I have seen with my own eyes CPR performed on many, many persons. But I don’t think any of them lived. CPR is not so much a “life-saving tool” as it is a “death-delaying” one, in my experience.
My first thoughts were: I hope this sad situation was unavoidable by the police. This had to happen? And what exactly did happen? It was dark. It happened quickly. But I figured the police knew what they were doing.
As well as the Ventura Police and California Highway Patrol, I saw a number of Oxnard Police vehicles on Harbor Blvd., and my initial speculations were this: Oxnard PD was in a pursuit from Oxnard onto the freeway and into neighboring Ventura, and some desperate dumb son-of-a-bitch decided to engage like 40 cops in a gunfight. And lost. Badly.
I was 100% correct in my speculation.
A few hours after the “officer involved shooting” I read the following in the local newspaper:
“Ventura police Cmdr. Sarah Starr said Ventura officers picked up a pursuit around 7:30 p.m. from Oxnard police officers who were following a suspect believed to be involved in an assault with a deadly weapon. The suspect was believed to have a handgun, she said.
“Starr said at some point the suspect’s vehicle became disabled at the intersection of Seaward Avenue and Harbor Boulevard. The suspect got out of the vehicle and was shot by a Ventura officer, authorities said. The suspect was hit by gunfire and was pronounced dead at the scene.
I imagine sooner or later I will hear the name of this deceased “suspect.” I will wonder about what led him to be in this position and to make the choices he did. Wonder about his family, or lack thereof. His path in life and the people he surrounded himself with. What was his story?
I’m an English teacher and stories are how I make sense of the world.
I would like to know a name. See his face.
Because I am almost 100% sure the “suspect” was a male. Probably 18-35 years of age. From Oxnard, it appears. So Latino, probably. Involved with the criminal element, almost for sure. Had a gun. Confronted the police with it after a chase. Is now deceased.
But we will have to wait and see. A thorough investigation. See what we can see. Not jump to conclusions — we will probably have to wait weeks to hear the official report. Will the officer’s body camera show a blur of movement, darkness, confusion, shouts, and then gunshots? I have seen such videos before and learned little from them. No black-and-white clarity but infinite shades of confounding and maddening gray, like so much in life.
The next day, as I write this, I can hardly believe it happened.
A police chase and shooting somehow having occurred almost right next to me? Fifty yards away?
What are the odds?
The audiobook I had been listening to had stated that violent incidents usually happen in the dark, start suddenly, and are over quickly. That is what happened here on Harbor Blvd., as far as I could tell. I try to pay attention to “situational awareness,” as the book I was listening to calls it — a person who might approach in a parking lot at night to rob me. I was ready for that. But I was not ready for a police shooting to roll up right next to me, with dozens of cop cars and seemingly half the law enforcement in Ventura County standing around afterwards.
But that is what happened.
I had worked in a LA trauma center at the end of my time in college and immediately after, and I saw a lot of violent death there. Mostly in the ER it was the result of people in heart attacks, strokes, traffic accidents, attempted suicides, stabbings and shootings — and the worst — people horribly burned until it looked like someone had basted them with BBQ sauce, and toddlers pulled out of pools dead with their hysterical parents in the ambulance next to them. I don’t talk about this with almost anyone, and I don’t wish to dwell on the details now. Let’s just say it was horrible. It changed me.
But until last night I haven’t been present for anyone’s violent death in some 30 years. It brought a lot back, surprising me.
So I’m writing the experience down. To process it all. That is what I do. But it makes me feel uncomfortable to write this.
I remember when I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. I was standing with a buddy one afternoon just northeast of the corner of Vermont Ave. and Wilshire Blvd. Suddenly we heard AK-47 fire from what I later learned was a gang-shooting at nearby Shatto Place on this block that was just full of gangbangers. I read later people died as a result. I remember clearly the look of disgust on my friend’s face as we heard the sharp crack of semi-automatic rifle fire in the distance —
“That was someone dying.”
Last night on Harbor Blvd in Ventura, it was the same. The sound of gunfire and someone dying.
It brings me back.
It is hard to describe. A rush of adrenaline. A jittery feeling in the stomach. A sense that this can’t really be happening. But you know it is. A certain disquiet of the soul.
I remember laying in my bed after watching for the first time with my own eyes a person die a violent death in front of me — an Asian-American coed at UCLA jumped to her death during finals week from the top of 7-story Hedrick Hall dormitory, and I watched her fall and hit the ground with a loud “crack” and then bounce up ten feet or so before coming to rest. I went home after work and laid in bed staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. I didn’t really have any clear thoughts. I just laid there in shock. I was 22-years old. I spent almost the whole night in bed looking up into the darkness. Sleep did not come until almost dawn.
It was not the last time I watched something like this. Not even close.
The clean holes made by bullets when they enter the body, with maybe a tiny tear on one side or the other, which weep and weep streams of rich red blood. The much larger, ragged exit wounds. Ugly as sin.
I soaked up the violence with my eyes, and I sought to make sense of it. I am not sure I ever succeeded.
“Breathe. Breath slow and deep,” I remind myself.
So here I am the day after, reflecting again on a thought I have thought many times in my life — “It’s a hell of a thing to kill a man.”
Rest In Peace, Suspect X. I imagine you had your reasons— or at least I hope so. Had you been drinking? Under the influence of some drug? Were you a hardened criminal? Were you ready to die? What were you thinking?
And find healing, Ventura Police Officer X who shot Suspect X, just doing your job as you were trained, I imagine. Avoid that insidious, lying bottle of alcohol you think brings numbness for pain. It hurts more than it helps. What’s done can’t be undone. Peace.
As for me, I’m ready to put last night’s nastiness in a small corner of my mind, and to bury it —
Sooner rather than later.
* Suspect X was later identified as Javier Magana, 32-years old, of Thousand Oaks, California. Magana had allegedly been involved in a shooting in Oxnard, and he was reported to be armed when the police tried to pull him over when the chase began and then the shooting happened. Magana allegedly fired a handgun after his car was disabled which was recovered at the scene (source). Ventura Police Officer Joaquin Ortega, a 23-year veteran of the department, shot Javier Magana. Officer Ortega works with the K-9 unit at the VPD (source).
“Had you been drinking? Under the influence of some drug? Were you a hardened criminal? Were you ready to die? What were you thinking?”
EVEN VIOLENT FELONS HAVE THEIR LOVED ONES:
Memorial on E. Harbor Blvd. Where Javier Magana Died
