The AP has just posted a detailed investigation into the background of David Brouillette, the recently hired ICE agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. It’s genuinely horrifying on more levels than are easy to describe. Brouillette was hired during ICE’s recent hiring spree, as the agency attempted to rapidly staff up to manage a program of mass deportation. Brouillette has a long history of severe mental illness, a lengthy history of violence against at least two wives as well as his children, stalking, a seemingly endless list of restraining orders, violent threats against other family members and more.
According to one relative, Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder as a child as well as attention deficit disorder, twice tried to commit suicide at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times. These early issues appear to have been compounded by service in the military and deployments to Afghanistan which left him with an increased propensity to violence as well as PTSD. A relative told the AP, “They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.” (An additional, horrifying detail: Brouillette was initially rejected by the military because of his mental health history. “But recruiters encouraged him to go off his medications for a year and reapply, which he did,” and he was then enlisted.) If all this weren’t enough, in 2021 he was broke and in some kind of firefighter training program when he was hit in the head by a steal beam and suffered a serious concussion and some sort of permanent brain damage, “with symptoms including impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo and light sensitivity.”
Crazy as it may sound, this is only some of what is revealed in this article. Brouillette sounds like a deeply disturbed and dangerous person. The one part of the story that paints Brouillette in a slightly sympathetic light is that he’s clearly been afflicted with serious mental illness from a young age. Some of the mental instability and propensity to violence are due to organic conditions he is afflicted with and for which he is in some sense not at fault. Obviously that gets into very basic conditions about free will, moral responsibility and all the rest. And for the purposes of this discussion, these are reasons he never should have been hired for any law enforcement role, never should have been allowed to own firearms and really never should have been allowed to enter the military. It certainly isn’t an excuse for chronic violence against family members. That detail that he was rejected by the military but then told — someone with severe bipolar disorder with a lengthy history of hospitalizations — to go off his medications and try again in a year just took my breath away.
We knew it would be bad when an agency already known as being the repository of people who couldn’t make the cut in other federal law enforcement agencies went on a breakneck hiring spree in what is basically a near full-employment economy. It was apparently even worse than we could have imagined.
