A State trooper in a helicopter shoots & kills the driver & passenger in a vehicle fleeing law enforcement. (who needs drones?)

(Mors ab Alto, which translates into  “Death from Above”, is a fitting Slogan of the U.S. Air Force’s 7th Bomb Wing. Stationed ironically enough at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, but not the border patrol or police officers.)

San Antonio, TX. - Two people died Thursday in the Rio Grande Valley after a trooper in a highway patrol helicopter opened fire on a vehicle fleeing law enforcement.

A Texas Department of Public Safety helicopter joined a pursuit initiated by Texas Parks and Wildlife on Thursday afternoon near La Joya in Hidalgo County, DPS spokeswoman Catherine Cesinger said.

A DPS officer “discharged a weapon” during the chase, according to Cesinger's statement.

She confirmed that two people traveling in the vehicle died, one was injured and transported to a hospital, and six others were captured.

Troopers were looking for additional subjects Thursday afternoon and the Texas Rangers are investigating the incident, Cesinger said.

Additional details were unavailable Thursday night.

DPS has taken an aggressive role on the border in recent years, increasing the number of troopers there, deploying boats and dispatching helicopters with designated marksmen armed with powerful rifles.

As a result, the agency has been involved in a large number of high-speed chases — sometimes ending in what troopers call “splashdowns,” when smugglers drive their vehicles into the Rio Grande to escape U.S. law enforcement.

Cartel operatives on the Mexican side often use boats to try to recover contraband from the smugglers' trucks.

The agency's director has said it's been forced into the role because federal agencies aren't doing enough to secure the border and because smugglers have become more aggressive, resorting to splashdowns, using other vehicles to block pursuits and throwing homemade spikes at officers.

But their methods have been questioned, including decisions to shoot at fleeing vehicles from patrol cars and helicopters, a tactic eschewed by other law enforcement agencies.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Trooper-in-copter-fires-on-vehicle-2-killed-3982867.php 
  
ACLU tells UN panel of rampant abuse by out-of-control border patrol.

By Brian Erickson:

Yesterday, I provided testimony at the United Nations as part of a U.N. General Assembly side event that examined human Rights violations at international borders, including the U.S.-Mexico border. The side event, which was chaired by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Mexican government’s ambassador to the U.N. and was attended by representatives of numerous nations, forms part of a growing dialogue within the U.N. and international community that began in March during an expert consultation on the matter and looks to continue at the upcoming Global Forum on Migration and Development. http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Migration/Events/Informalsummaryconclusions2012.pdf

While you may not recognize the names of Carlos Lamadrid or Ramses Barron Torres, civil society and international outcry hopefully means you’re more likely to have heard of 15-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Guereca or 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was shot seven times in the back by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent just two weeks ago. These four young men were all under 20 years of age when U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials shot and killed them. Three of them were standing on the Mexican side of our shared border as alleged participants in rock throwing incidents (which appears to justify lethal use of force under CBP policy, a position that would be unthinkable for U.S. police departments to take or if it happened on our Northern border). Two of them were shot multiple times in the back.

One of them, Carlos Lamadrid, was a U.S. citizen.Their deaths form part of a larger trend of deadly use of force incidents by CBP officials—18 to be exact—since January 2010. Of greatest concern, however, is the complete lack of transparent investigations or any form of accountability in the vast majority of these cases. As highlighted in the ACLU’s written testimony provided at the U.N. side event, the ACLU is not alone in calling for improved training and greater oversight mechanisms to bring accountability to our nation’s largest law enforcement agency currently acting with near impunity. http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/10/25/aclu-testifies-at-un-on-border-patrol-killings-and-human-rights-abuses/

The frequency and regularity of CBP’s use of lethal force is alarming and demands a comprehensive, independent investigation of CBP policies and practices, as requested by members of Congress, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition of  60 non-governmental organizations, including the ACLU.”
http://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights-criminal-law-reform-national-security/cause-alarm-aclu-tells-un-panel-rampant

Update: State trooper claims he was attempting to disable the vehicle and suspected it was being used to smuggle drugs.

LA Joya, TX - A Texas state trooper who fired on a pickup truck from a helicopter and killed two illegal immigrants during a chase through the desert was trying to disable the vehicle and suspected it was being used to smuggle drugs, authorities said Friday.

The disclosure came a day after the incident that left two Guatemalan nationals dead on an isolated gravel road near the town of La Joya, just north of the Mexico border.

State game wardens were the first to encounter the truck Thursday. After the driver refused to stop, they radioed for help and state police responded, according to Parks and Wildlife Department spokesman Mike Cox.

When the helicopter with a sharpshooter arrived, officers concluded that the truck appeared to be carrying a "typical covered drug load" on its bed and was travelling at reckless speeds, police said.

An expert on police chases said the decision to fire on the truck was "a reckless act" that served "no legitimate law enforcement purpose."

"In 25 years following police pursuits, I hadn't seen a situation where an officer shot a speeding vehicle from a helicopter," said Geoffrey Alpert, professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. Such action would be reasonable only if "you know for sure the person driving the car deserves to die and that there are no other occupants."

In general, he said, law enforcement agencies allow the use of deadly force only when the car is being used as a weapon, not "just on a hunch," Alpert added.

The Texas Department of Public Safety referred questions about its policy governing the use of deadly force to its general manual, which says troopers are allowed to use such force when defending themselves or someone else from serious harm or death. Shooting at vehicles is justified to disable a vehicle or when deadly force is deemed necessary.

Other law enforcement agencies that patrol the border say they have similar limits on the practice.

For instance, federal Customs and Borders Protection agents "are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law enforcement partners and innocent third parties," agency spokesman Doug Mosier said.http://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/Trooper-fired-from-chopper-to-stop-truck-kills-2-3984508.php#ixzz2AXXnUosb