Summer comes early in Texas. And May in the high desert around the West Texas town of Redford can be scorching. It was there, on a hot day in 1997, that four ghillie-suit-clad Marines shot and killed eighteen-year-old Esequiel Hernández Jr. They had been briefed about “armed lookouts” deployed by an “organized, sophisticated, and dangerous enemy.” They had been warned about Redford, a small border community of less than one hundred that preferred Spanish to English — that it was “not a friendly town” and potentially working with the enemy.

When police and others arrived at the scene a story began to unfold about a young man armed with a World War I–era .22 rifle menacing the marines. The account quickly fell apart. Was Esequiel a goatherd or a drug smuggler? They claimed he was a smuggler, but identified him on the radio before the shooting as a goatherd. Did Esequiel fire one shot or two? The Marines couldn’t agree. An empty casing was found in the gun, but no gunpowder residue was on Esequiel’s hand. They claimed to be in imminent danger, but Esequiel was more than two hundred yards away carrying a weapon with a range of less than one hundred yards. After some initial disagreement, the Marines said that Esequiel was pointing his rifle at them, forcing them to fire. A later autopsy revealed Esequiel could not have been aiming his weapon at them. Their stalking of Esequiel through the desert — a procedural no-no — became “paralleling” in their official statement, whereas Esequiel was described as running a “flanking maneuver.”

Multiple grand juries were held, no indictments were forthcoming. The community was devastated. Rev. Mel Lafollette, a Hernández family friend, told a San Antonio newspaper, “The Marines left their observation post, they stalked him, they came onto private property, and then they killed him.” In an interview with investigators, Clemente Bañuelos, the Marine who shot Esequiel, was more succinct, “I capped the fucker.”