Blame the victim: Immigrant faces charges in death of Florida policeman
Apolice encounter in Florida last year, captured in raw and shocking body camera footage, left someone dead. What’s new, you might say? Well, this particular interaction between law enforcement and an Indigenous teen from Guatemala didn’t follow the typical script. In many ways, it was worse.
Here are the facts: The encounter happened the night of May 19 outside a motel in St. Augustine, Fla., where Virgilio Aguilar Mendez, who does not speak English and whose primary language is the Mayan dialect Mam, was staying with fellow farmworkers. The teen, according to court documents, was on his cellphone talking with his family.
That’s when St. Johns County Sheriff ’s Office Sergeant Michael Kunovich saw Aguilar Mendez, then 18, deemed him suspicious, and started questioning him, according to body camera video shared by one of Aguilar Mendez’s lawyers. The encounter quickly escalates after Aguilar Mendez (whose first name was originally misspelled as Vergilio in police paperwork) told Kunovich that he doesn’t speak English and the officer attempts to search him. More officers arrive and the young man is subdued to the ground after a struggle, then held in a choke hold and pinned down. He is tasered several times before being handcuffed. The teen is heard crying out and repeatedly saying, “sorry” and “familia.” Police found a small pocketknife on him.
Minutes after the incident, Kunovich suffered a heart attack. The 52-year-old officer died later at the hospital. According to medical examiners, he died of natural causes and preexisting health conditions.
And yet, Aguilar Mendez, now 19, was charged with murder for Kunovich’s death that same night. Yes, read that again — the Guatemalan teen was charged for the death of someone who was deemed to have died of natural causes.
Rightly so, the case has caused indignation among Florida activists and immigration advocates. But it hasn’t really registered in the national consciousness or prompted much-needed conversations about police brutality against brown or Indigenous people. That has to change.
”The videos speak for themselves,” Phillip Arroyo, one of Aguilar Mendez’s lawyers, told me in an interview. “This is a grave injustice. He was a victim of excessive force. Our position is that he was racially profiled when he was walking within a very well lit sidewalk.
There’s nothing criminal about that.”
Initially, and before the full body camera footage was released, the sheriff ’s office claimed that Aguilar Mendez was trespassing, but that does not appear to be the case according to the videos and subsequent local media reports. In the videos, Kunovich never stated why he thought Aguilar Mendez was suspicious or why he was stopping him.
Arroyo is Aguilar Mendez’s civil rights attorney in a federal lawsuit that he’s filing soon against the St. Johns Sheriff ’s Office for “an unconstitutional violation of [Aguilar Mendez’s] rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment,” Arroyo said. Aguilar Mendez has been in jail without bond since the incident. Last summer, the initial murder charge was reduced to aggravated manslaughter of an officer and resisting an officer with violence.
As for the pocketknife, Arroyo said Aguilar Mendez carried it because that’s what he used to cut fruit while working in the field. In the video, the young man is heard saying the word “sandía,” referring to the knife.
Mariana Blanco, assistant executive director of The Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth, Fla., said in an interview that her organization has been helping Aguilar Mendez’s family in Guatemala.
“Virgilio’s parents couldn’t even finish watching the body camera video,” Blanco said. “They just said, ‘please stop.’ ” For them,
Blanco said, it’s reminiscent of historic statesponsored violence that has been committed against Indigenous populations in Guatemala. Blanco said Aguilar Mendez’s case is a prime example as to why the nation has lost trust in police forces. Similarly, Arroyo said Hispanics are being abused by law enforcement agencies across the country, just like Black Americans, “but their stories never reach the light of day because of numerous factors, such as the language barrier or fear of retaliation, such as deportation.”
Indeed, between 2011 and 2020, the rate of Hispanics killed by law enforcement officers grew by nearly 45 percent, according to a study published in the Journal of Community Health in May — the same month that Aguilar Mendez was charged with Kunovich’s death. That’s a rate that has outpaced the Latino population growth in the same period of time.
Researchers Jagdish Khubchandani of New Mexico State University and James H. Price of the University of Toledo — recognizing that “not much is known about [law enforcement officer]-induced lethal injuries among Hispanics” — analyzed mortality data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study recommended policy changes to mitigate unnecessary violence against Latinos by police, such as reconsidering overpolicing Black and brown communities and better mental health training for officers.
Earlier this month, Blanco started a Change.org petition to raise awareness of the case. It has more than half a million signatures. Other than coverage in Spanish-language TV networks and going viral on social media last month thanks to a Latino influencer, the case hasn’t received much media attention.
”It is revolting to witness three officers, none of whom speak Spanish, using a knee on the young man’s back and neck, as well as a chokehold when he had not committed a crime and was simply walking when confronted,” reads a statement from Domingo Garcia, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, which calls itself the country’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization. “We firmly believe that any judicial action taken against this young man is premature and inappropriate.”
As Arroyo noted, there was no reasonable suspicion for police to stop Aguilar Mendez. The case cries out for full police accountability, starting with dismissing the unjust charges against the young Guatemalan man.