Death on an Arkansas highway: what happened to Daniel Barajas?
Daniel Barajas awoke a few minutes after 4.30am to a spotlight shining through the foggy window of his SUV on a central Arkansas highway. Two sheriff’s deputies stood outside.
He had stopped to sleep after a long day spent driving. A few more hours in the darkness of Interstate 30 and Barajas would arrive in Texas and meet his infant niece and nephew for the first time.
But first the 38-year-old had the cops to deal with. The Saline county sheriff’s deputies had stopped Barajas after reportedly seeing his car parked on a highway on-ramp and searched the vehicle for drugs. Their interaction would take nearly an hour and a half and involve six deputies and two EMTs.
Barajas never made it to his destination.
Roughly six minutes after deputies reported clearing the area and leaving him in his vehicle on the side of the dark and rainy highway with an order not to drive, Barajas was fatally struck on the interstate.
Barajas’s family was told he walked into oncoming traffic. An officer told his sister that police believed Barajas was a drug trafficker and that he had been hallucinating.
But Barajas was excited to see family and meet his niece and nephew, his sisters, Xexilia Barajas and Raquel Ramos, said. Their brother had no history with drugs – he was a traveling contract welder who had worked on projects for the federal government. The coroner ruled his death a suicide.
The nature of Barajas’s death and the official account of what occurred on 15 January 2022, described in reports that include numerous errors, incomplete documents and contradictory accounts from deputies, has raised serious questions for his loved ones.
On Wednesday, the Barajas family filed a civil rights complaint against the deputies, the sheriff, the Arkansas state police and the coroner, arguing that Barajas was profiled because of his
Latino heritage and deputies violated his rights and caused his death.
The family and their attorney, Mike Laux, a national civil rights lawyer who has worked on police misconduct cases in Arkansas for 13 years, hope that the lawsuit will shed light on what exactly occurred on the highway.
“This is destroying us, destroying our family, not knowing,” Xexilia said. “We want the truth.”
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Barajas lived in New Mexico with a roommate, though he spent much of his time on the road traveling to job sites across the US, sometimes visiting multiple states a month. His vehicle was stocked with everything he needed for his travels, including specialty contacts and welder’s eye goggles to treat his eye conditions, and his rosary.
He was close with his family – they regularly got together to camp and ski in New Mexico. While he was away working, they would check in over the phone frequently. But he hadn’t seen his sisters Raquel and Xexilia, who had both recently given birth, in months due to the pandemic.
On 14 January 2022, he spent the day driving through Kentucky headed toward Dallas. He told his roommate that he had considered sleeping in a hotel but decided against it, his family said.
“[His roommate] said he was so excited to see us,” Xexilia said. “He said he wanted to hurry up and get on the road to see the family.”
At some point in his journey, he stopped to sleep in the back of his Nissan Xterra off Interstate 30 in Saline county, about 45 miles (72km) outside Little Rock.
According to reports from the Saline county sheriff’s office, deputies reported coming upon Barajas’s vehicle in the middle of an on-ramp at around 4.35am. The deputies quickly made contact with a supervisor, who dispatched a canine officer.
The deputies Sullivan Sulzberger and Hunter Thompson describe Barajas as acting bizarrely, and note that one or both of his eyes were very red. Barajas suffered from multiple eye conditions, including one that caused irritation and redness.
Barajas appeared to be “not completely coherent” and talking to himself, the deputies wrote. Sulzberger states in his report that at one point during the stop he and Thompson had to grab Barajas by the arm after he attempted to walk past them and into traffic – something not mentioned in Thompson’s report.
During their interactions, Barajas told the police that he was fine but that he was having an issue with his contact lens. Still, the deputies contacted medical personnel, stating that Barajas was experiencing hallucinations and had attempted to walk into traffic.
The EMTs who evaluated Barajas said he appeared “altered” but was calm and alert and able to answer questions. More deputies had arrived on scene, including a drug detection dog. Neither the canine nor the deputies who searched his vehicle found any drugs.
The deputies who checked his identity found he did not have a criminal record. He reportedly told deputies that he may have been acting strange because he had not slept much.
Still, Thompson said in his report that he informed Barajas that he could not drive “due to his mental state” but said that he could wait in his vehicle for his girlfriend to come pick him up. The deputies reported leaving the area around 5.51am with a lieutenant telling Barajas that he could walk to a nearby truck stop but that he should not try to cross the interstate. She describes him as walking in the direction of the stop as deputies departed.
At 5.57am, a driver in a Kia was on his way to work when he saw a man suddenly enter the highway, according to the family’s lawsuit. He braked, but struck him, sending him over the hood of his car. The driver quickly pulled over and ran to try to help the man, who was on his hands and knees. The man, Barajas, held his arm out over his face, as if to brace himself, the lawsuit states, and was then hit by multiple semi trucks.
In the aftermath, the driver was told by law enforcement that he shouldn’t feel bad about hitting Barajas because he was a “homeless drug addict” and that he was a suspected drug trafficker, the lawsuit states.
The coroner determined that Daniel Barajas’s cause of death was multiplesystems blunt force trauma. He died by suicide, the coroner ruled.
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Barajas’s death shocked his family, Xexilia and Raquel recalled in a recent interview with the Guardian. They wanted to believe the official account, they said, but as they sought more information they encountered pushback from local authorities. They learned that Barajas’s wallet, keys, cash box and cellphone were missing.
“We are not a family that’s in denial. The story doesn’t make sense,” Xexilia said.
Raquel, an immigration lawyer, and Xexilia, a vice-president at a financial firm, hired Laux, who requested files from the county and state police.
“In over 20 years as a lawyer, and a solid 18 years doing high-end civil rights litigation, I have never seen more poorly and incompetently written reports,” he said. “Those reports raise immediate red flags.”
The deputies’ accounts appear to contradict each other, with some stating that Barajas’s SUV was in the middle of the road and another stating it was partially blocking the road. The deputies did not take photos of Barajas’s vehicle before or after his death. One deputy described Barajas as responsive, while another, describing the same interaction, said that he refused to answer questions.
Some of the reports from different deputies contain copied-andpasted sentences describing Barajas. The report from the canine officer includes a passage referring to an entirely different incident unrelated to Barajas. One deputy who was on scene the entire time is not listed in any of the deputies’ reports and never filed a report himself – a highly unusual occurrence, Laux said.
The coroner’s report referenced photos of Barajas’s remains, but the office later said it had lost the images, Laux said. The family said that coroner declined their request for autopsy and toxicology reports, citing the condition of Barajas’s body.