Man ICE shot with no camera running now charged with assaulting the officer who shot him

…(cont) So then Austin. An ICE officer shoots a Venezuelan man named Wilber Garcés Pérez during a DoorDash run on a Sunday in September. And here's where I could use the help, because the affidavit says the officer who fired wasn't wearing a body camera at all, and the officer standing next to him had his — and had turned it off. Two officers. How many working cameras between them? I keep doing that math on the porch and getting the same number, and I want somebody at the agency to tell me I'm doing it wrong.

Down at the toll plaza there's a sign that says "outstanding toll event," which is the state's way of saying you didn't pay and now you owe more. I paid mine off — cost me an afternoon and a stamp — but I remember standing in that line thinking: somebody got paid to find nicer words for a plain thing. I'm not saying it's the same office as the one that indicted Castro. I'm asking whether it's the same instinct.

Because here's the part where I really need the tutorial. With Castro, there was something to check the story against — his own statements, presumably, and whatever record existed. Weeks later, in Austin, prosecutors didn't charge either officer with anything about the shooting itself. They charged Garcés Pérez, the man who got shot, with assaulting an officer. No camera on the shooter, no camera from the man beside him — and the account that survives to be checked is whose, exactly? I'm asking the experts. I'd genuinely like a diagram.

I called the courthouse to ask if there's a form for this, a place where you write down what you can't reconcile, and while I was standing there in the driveway thinking I'd let it go — one more thing, and then I'll get off the phone, I promise. The charge on Castro's paper, the one that got him picked up in September: what did they call it? False statements. That's the phrase. And I keep wondering, out here on the porch, what you're charged with when there was nothing running to be false about — when there's no statement left to check, false or otherwise.