Descend into the Particular

SPEAKER_04: Pushkin. SPEAKER_01: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_08: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on this show you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_09: These days there are tons of studies exploring what it takes to keep people happy at work. And the science shows that to be happier, workers need to feel appreciated and valued. They also need to feel protected. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss and more, the Hartford has flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the diverse and unique needs of your employees. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. Quick heads up, this episode contains depictions of violence that may be upsetting to some listeners. SPEAKER_04: In a small, elegant apartment in Hollywood, a young man sits on his couch looking out the open window, remembering the saddest day of his life. His name is Felipe Navarro, 30 years old, short black hair, a beautiful wide smile. SPEAKER_11: Angel was my brother. He was my only sibling. We were born exactly like a year and two weeks apart. So my birthday is mid-October and he was born the following year on Halloween. SPEAKER_04: That was the beginning. And this was the end. SPEAKER_11: He died Thursday, May 26, 2016, and it was about to be Friday Memorial Day weekend. And we were not notified until that Sunday morning. And they claimed that they couldn't find us, even though they had his wallet and his NID. So then come that Sunday, my parents had gone to breakfast and they came back and there's about four or five cop cars at their home. SPEAKER_04: Angel had been in New Mexico visiting with a friend. Felipe and their parents were in California. Felipe doesn't know why it took so long for the New Mexico police to notify them. Three days. Didn't his brother have his ID on him? And even after the police came, the Navarro's didn't know what happened to Angel. SPEAKER_11: I called the detective and every time I spoke to her, they were like, unfortunately, like, we can't give you any information because it's under investigation. And everything was always under investigation. And at first I didn't really think anything, any sort of malice on the police department, because I don't even think I knew at that point that he had been killed by the police. And I certainly didn't even know the backstory of how he even got into that altercation with the police. I should say incident, not altercation. But I think all I was trying to figure out was what had happened. SPEAKER_04: Angel Navarro was killed by the police on Interstate 25 in New Mexico outside Albuquerque on May 26, 2016. The officers fired 27 times. They thought Navarro had a gun in his hand. He didn't. He had a cell phone. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the final episode in my three-part miniseries on thinking like a Jesuit. I will warn you now, what I'm talking about in this episode is not for the faint of heart. I heard about the shooting of Angel Navarro because I went to see a forensic criminologist named Ron Martinelli. Martinelli works out of a white ranch house in Texas Hill Country, half an hour north of San Antonio. He's in his 60s, built like a prizefighter, bald, thick mustache, pickup truck, likes to be called Dr. Ron. I had been obsessed with a police guideline called the 21-foot rule and thought Martinelli could help me. But then we got off on tangents and never returned. SPEAKER_02: I was a tactical officer. I'm a firearms instructor. I'm a firearms expert. I've been involved in officer-involved shootings. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli is an investigator. An incident occurs. He gets called in to go over the evidence and figure out what happened, reconstruct, interpret. Was there a crime? SPEAKER_02: And I sympathize on both sides with regards to officer-involved. I've handled officer-involved shootings for the defense, and I've handled officer-involved shootings for plaintiffs. SPEAKER_04: How many officer-involved shooting cases have you done over the course of? SPEAKER_02: Hundreds. Hundreds? Yeah. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli wrote a book a few years ago called The Truth Behind the Black Lives Matter Movement and the War on Police. It has chapters on Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, other cases in the news. You want to know about the Rodney King beating, maybe the most infamous example of police brutality in recent American history? Dr. Ron has a lot to say about it. SPEAKER_02: The baton. You wouldn't have used it. I wouldn't have used a pepper spray. It wouldn't have worked. There's more dynamics, chemical dynamics, involved with pepper spray. They wouldn't just, here's the deal. It wouldn't have worked. SPEAKER_04: At one point, we went outside in the garden behind his house, and we acted out an arrest scenario. I was the cop. He was playing the bad guy. He gave me a handgun and took another for himself. The wind was howling. It was all a bit surreal. My job was to take him into custody. We ran through the scenario three times. He shot me dead three times. I had the feeling I wasn't the first person shot dead in Dr. Ron's backyard. We went back inside. SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we're going to play a kids' game. So just hold your hand out, just like that. Yeah. Okay, and I'm going to hit your hand. Yeah. Okay, so I've already told you I'm going to hit your hand. So your expectation is I'm going to hit your hand. So it's really simple. My hand's right here, and you just move it so you don't get hit. Are you ready? SPEAKER_04: I was ready. His hand was about a foot above mine. I knew he was going to slap me. I still couldn't get my hand out of the way in time. SPEAKER_02: You ready? Yeah. SPEAKER_02: You see that? Okay, you get it? Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about action-reaction perception lag time. SPEAKER_04: Every kid knows how that game plays out. Action is always faster than reaction. The person who decides to initiate the slap can always get your hand before you can react. That was my problem out in the backyard, he said. I was afraid of being too aggressive. But if you wait for the other person to pull their gun, you'll end up dead. SPEAKER_02: Okay, so let me set this up for you. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli pulled out his laptop. He had a YouTube video he wanted to show me that proved his point about action and reaction. SPEAKER_02: SWAT teams got a warrant on a guy on weapons charges because they bring a whole SWAT team with them. Everybody's armed, heavily armed, already got carbines on them. Guns are being pointed at this guy. They do the knock. The door opens. Here's the guy. He's standing about 10 feet away, maybe 12 feet away. He's in the living room. He's got a t-shirt. He's wearing shorts. He's got a gun in his right hand, and the gun is down at his side. So the question is, how long does it take someone with the gun at their side to raise up and accurately fire before you can fire? Action, reaction, perception lag time. It's human factors. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli presses play. SPEAKER_02: Their only problem is they talk to them too much. SPEAKER_02: There's the gun. You see the gun? SPEAKER_02: Drop the gun, drop the gun. SPEAKER_04: Drop the gun. The video is from a camera carried by one of the cops. So that's the perspective we're seeing. It's all jumping and confusing. We're looking over the shoulder of one of the officers at the man in the t-shirt. He looks like he just got out of bed. Then suddenly there are shots, shouting. It all happens very quickly. So what happened? I totally went... You weren't ready for it? He had... so the guy has a gun. SPEAKER_02: He raised that gun up in twenty five hundredths of a second and shot two of them. And then they returned firing and killed him. SPEAKER_04: So these guys had their guns... Already pointed at him. Already pointed at him. He has his gun hanging down by his side and he manages to get to shoot two of them before they kill him. And they're trained SWAT officers. Right. SPEAKER_04: It's unbelievable. SPEAKER_02: Okay. SPEAKER_04: My thought watching that video was that the cops seemed really aggressive with their body armor and automatic weapons, shouting and breaking down someone's door. Martinelli's point was that they weren't aggressive enough. They got shot. They could have been killed. What was all this endless drop the gun, drop the gun? But they're... they get shot because they're... they don't want to shoot them. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I'm not going to tell the guy eighteen times to put the gun down. Okay. What would you have done then? I would have shot him. You would have shot him. Oh yeah. As soon as that... as soon as I saw that end start to come up, I would have let loose. Yeah. Because I understand the human factors. They don't understand it. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli played the video again. There were nuances he wanted to show me, like how the officers were holding their body shields all wrong. This is what he does for a living. He watches people kill each other in order to figure out who did what and why, which requires him to go over and over things that, in a perfect world, no one should have to see even once. He told me that he wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes and finds himself rearranging bodies in his mind. It was then, since we were already on the topic of police officers shooting people, that he brought up a case he'd just finished working on. That's when we return. SPEAKER_01: People are excited about what AI will do for them. At IBM, we're excited about what AI will do for business. Your business. 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I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly. Eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us, oh yes, there is. ZipRecruiter. New hires cost on average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there. Believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_04: I'm looking for a sofa. A pursuit by the way, which has consumed far too many hours of my life. And then I found article, and I'll tell you what I'm getting. A Svengras sectional in green velvet, which will be in my living room by the end of the month for a fraction of what the other fancy sofa makers are charging. And this is my favorite part from the product description. 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One of the Jesuits I consulted with was a priest named James Martin, who spoke about one of the crucial teachings behind this idea, the Jesuit notion of disordered attachments. SPEAKER_10: The person who's discerning should be like the pointer on a balance. Should be here. You shouldn't be here. Like someone's putting your finger in the balance. You should be ready. Right in the center. Yeah. And then you're ready to listen to things, which is a great insight. Go say it. SPEAKER_04: Why did this matter? SPEAKER_10: So basically Ignatius says that if you're going to make a decision, you have to come without any preconceived notions. You have to be like the pointer on a balance, those old scales on the supermarket for fruit. You have to be at zero. SPEAKER_04: A disordered attachment is not a vice. It's just something that gets in the way of us being open-minded. Being free to really listen to what others are saying and feeling. SPEAKER_10: You know, when I was a Jesuit novice, my novice director, we would do ministries, different ministries, in addition to praying in the house and learning about the Jesuits. And that was a key part of our work. And it was with the poor or the sick. And he said, well, where do you want to go? And I said, well, let me just say the last place I want to work is in a hospital, because I just don't like the sights and the smells and the sounds, and it just grosses me out. And he said, well, good. You'll be working in a hospital. And it wasn't to be mean. It was to free me of that disordered attachment. SPEAKER_04: Martin could not be truly capable of service to another because he was too attached to his own fears. Let me put this same issue of disordered attachments to you. Remember what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in late summer of 2014? SPEAKER_05: There was growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. But there are conflicting reports about what led up to the shooting. NBC's John Yang has the details. SPEAKER_04: A police officer named Darren Wilson hears a report that a teenager has allegedly stolen something from a convenience store, a box of cigars. He spots 18-year-old Michael Brown walking down the middle of the street, thinks Brown matches the description of the suspect, and pulls over. Ninety seconds later, Brown is dead. The black community in Ferguson erupts in protest for weeks. The police counter with armored cars and snipers and a small army of officers in combat gear. People took sides according to whatever ideology they were attached to. Either this was about law and order and you were on Darren Wilson's side, or this was about police brutality and you were on Michael Brown's side. So what happened after Ferguson? Well, the following spring, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice issued two reports on the case. The first said, we're not indicting Officer Darren Wilson. What he did doesn't meet the federal legal standard for police misconduct. The second federal report came out the same day. It was what's called a patterns and practices investigation. It was a broader look at policing in Ferguson. One of the principal authors of the second report was a lawyer named Chirag Bains. SPEAKER_07: What we found was something I hadn't seen in other departments, but I've since learned exists in many places in America, which is a police department and actually an entire criminal justice architecture that existed and operated to extract wealth from the community and specifically from the black community in Ferguson. SPEAKER_04: Bains and his team arrived in Ferguson two days after Michael Brown was killed. They stayed there on and off for five months. What they found was that Ferguson was using its police department to fund the city's budget. And that colored everything that they did. SPEAKER_07: Who they arrested, who they stopped, who they issued citations to, who got leniency and who was met without any in the court, who was willing to cooperate with law enforcement. There are a number of emails from the finance director to the police chief asking him if he can raise revenues, often by very specific numbers. There's one saying, can you increase with the last increase you were able to do was 7.5 percent over last year's revenues. Can you bring that up to 10 percent this year? Can we get over a million in revenues this year in fines and fees? There's even an email where the finance director is suggesting to the police chief, a particular enforcement strategy suggesting that he deploy a certain number of overtime officers for traffic enforcement in a certain part of the city in order to, and this is a quote, fill the revenue pipeline. It's very bizarre for the finance director to be issuing any kind of instruction to the police chief on how to deploy patrol officers. But that's a window into what the priority was and what they decided to use their police force for. SPEAKER_04: Baines and his team found evidence that one time officials in Ferguson wanted to get rid of an incompetent judge. But the city manager said, we can't get rid of him. He's too good at levying fines. Police officers were rewarded and promoted for their productivity, meaning how many tickets they issued. So of course they issued a lot of tickets. Any offense would do. Baines remembers one case of a man who was sitting in his car at a playground cooling off after playing basketball. An officer drove up, blocked the man's car, and demanded to see an ID. I think he said something to the effect of, like, there are kids here and you're at the SPEAKER_07: park. What are you, a pedophile? I don't know the exact words, but that was my sense of what happened from talking to the gentleman. And the officer then orders him out of the car. And the guy says, I'm not doing anything. I mean, I have constitutional rights. I'm just sitting here, you know, just playing ball. And the officer then actually pulls his gun on the guy and, you know, threatening him and insisting that he get out of the car. The way the incident ends is that the officer writes him up for eight different tickets, including not having a seatbelt on, sitting in his car at the park, not having a license, and also having a suspended license. He managed to issue both charges. SPEAKER_04: Eight tickets. One of them was for using a false name because the guy used his nickname, like Tom instead of Thomas. If you read the two Department of Justice reports together, what you realize is that after Brown's death, both sides in the debate were wrong. One side said, Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed teenager in cold blood. Remember, there was a big to do about the fact that Michael Brown was supposed to have put his hands up and said, don't shoot. The facts of this case, when you look at what we found on the criminal side, what the Justice SPEAKER_07: Department found on the criminal side, were that Michael Brown didn't have his hands up and he wasn't surrendering when he was shot. But that's what people thought, and that's a narrative that quickly developed. SPEAKER_04: The DOJ concluded, after reviewing forensic evidence, that at one point Michael Brown reached into Wilson's open car window and wrestled with him over his gun for goodness' sake. If you think this is a case about a rogue cop, you missed the point. The shooting of Michael Brown is not about a homicidal cop. It's about decades of predatory policing, about the consequences of having an entire law enforcement system organized around looting the black community. Meanwhile, the other side sees that Wilson is not facing federal charges and says, see, we were right. The police officer didn't do anything wrong. This case is about a breakdown in respect for law and order. But that completely misses the point too. Yes, Michael Brown was a kid who did not view police power as legitimate. But that's because he lived in a town where police power was not legitimate. SPEAKER_07: And so for me, it's very important that people read both reports. I've spoken on this topic a number of times, and I'm often speaking to a group that's only read one report. Or sometimes that has read both reports or read some parts of both reports, but only believes one. And I have to say, it was the same Justice Department that did both reports. There wasn't an agenda here to bury the truth. It was a very thorough investigation on both sides. And it's rare to find people who read both and believe both and understand how they connect. SPEAKER_04: It's rare to find people who read both and believe both and understand how they connect. It's rare to find people without disordered attachments when it comes to police shootings. So Angel Navarro, the case Dr. Ron brought up unexpectedly, and that I have to admit, left me shaken. Let's start with a clean slate. The shooting of Angel Navarro was captured by the dash cam video of one of the officers involved in the incident. You cannot find it on the internet. It was not released publicly. For the longest time, the New Mexico police wouldn't even give it to the Navarro family, which made Felipe Navarro suspicious. He and his parents filed a lawsuit, hired two lawyers on contingency, Erica Anderson and Lauren Oliveros. My researcher, Camille Baptista, went to Los Angeles to talk to Felipe. They sat together for a couple of hours. He talked about how draining the case was, depositions, motions. The whole thing went on for two and a half years. His lawyers tried to warn him. SPEAKER_11: Because it was recorded on video, the incident, and because of the certain evidence that was, you know, there, I thought it was sort of cut and dry as to what the tape showed and what they were arguing and what we were arguing. So in my mind, that's where I said, like, I was naive and thinking like, oh, well, like, the tape's there. Like, this is evidence. It's like, the camera doesn't lie, you know? But, you know, I remember I, we would have talks about like, like how lawsuits work. In my mind, I was like, I don't know how you could possibly justify three people shooting in an unarmed person, one person, 27 times. SPEAKER_01: When did you first see the video? You described that you saw the video. SPEAKER_11: We did not get the video for I think, like six months. It was not an easy thing to get. SPEAKER_07: And then once you saw it, you had, like strong feelings about what it showed. SPEAKER_11: If I could, you know, put myself in their shoes, and vice versa, because I did try to do that and sort of, okay, let me I know my brother. I know him, you know, enough to know that what I saw in the video was kind of odd behavior from him. It seemed a little erratic. SPEAKER_02: This was a challenging one. SPEAKER_04: Ron Martinelli was retained as an expert witness by the New Mexico Attorney General on behalf of the state police. He watched the tape as well. SPEAKER_02: What was the challenge for me as a criminologist? Using our audio videologist and breaking it down and showing the judge that, hey, this is what it was about. The judge had no idea. SPEAKER_04: Martinelli had a phrase he kept saying to me, every case is different, which I began to realize was his operating principle, kind of like the injunction of the Jesuits to descend into the particular. You have to assume that the specifics, the details of the case in question matter. His task was to work backwards on the shooting, reconstructing the hours before the New Mexico police confronted Angel Navarro, until he had a complete narrative of that day. SPEAKER_09: 911, emergency. I'd like to report a stolen car, please. SPEAKER_10: What's the address? SPEAKER_03: This is what he believes Angel Navarro did. SPEAKER_02: He drops his girlfriend off, and he's in a parking lot, and he gets out of the car, and he confronts just some citizen on the street. I'm giving you the synopsized version. And he slices him with a knife. So did he threaten you with a knife? SPEAKER_10: Yes. He cut me in the hand with it. SPEAKER_02: And then he leaves. SPEAKER_04: He took off heading south on 6th Street. Angel Navarro stole the man's car. SPEAKER_02: And of course, the man calls the police. They have a good description of the vehicle. They have a license plate. There is a bolo put out, a be on the lookout for, and they end up spotting this vehicle on State Highway. And so unmarked units get behind him initially because they just happen to see him. And they start following him, and then a marked unit comes up, and they try to pull him over, and Mr. Navarro takes off. But he doesn't take off at a really, really fast speed because the speed limit in New Mexico, I think on this highway, went between 75 and 80. And he was only going about 86 miles an hour. So he's clearly not trying to elude the officers. He's just driving. Southbound 6th and westbound on Gold. He ends up stopping in the middle of the highway. And they're waiting for him, and they're trying to give him some instructions to do what we refer to as a felony car stop. And that doesn't work. And he takes off again, but he's going slower. And everybody's trying to figure out, what is this guy going to do? What's he going to do? SPEAKER_04: Navarro drives on for another 12 miles. Then he stops in the middle of the highway a second time. The officers pull up behind him. He sits in his car for three minutes talking on the phone. He's on the phone with who? With the police. SPEAKER_02: Oh, I see. Calls the dispatcher. He's on the phone with the police, right? And I'm armed, and I'm a bad guy. And so when he finally, they tell him to get out of the car. He gets out of the car, and then he faces them, and they're giving him instructions to step away from the vehicle, keep your hands up, do this. He turns sideways. He goes into his pocket. They're screaming at him, don't do that. Don't do that. SPEAKER_04: The whole thing is weird, starting right back with Navarro's attack on a stranger in the parking lot. SPEAKER_02: Why commit that crime? Why just pick an individual and slice him for no reason at all? He hadn't done anything to you. That was to get that person to call the police with a crime of violence. SPEAKER_04: He's committed two felonies at that point, but he seems to want the police around him. SPEAKER_02: So he gets on the phone and tells him, okay, listen, I'm armed. I not only have a knife, but I have a gun, and I'm this, and I'm that. So the question would be, why would you do that? Because he is choreographing an eventual death act. SPEAKER_04: If you talk to enough people in law enforcement, you'll hear stories like this. Joni Johnston, a forensic psychologist who works with Martinelli, told me about a case outside San Diego where a 15-year-old boy called 911 from a school parking lot. He pointed what turned out to be a BB gun at police. When the police told him to drop the weapon, he just kept walking towards them until they had no choice but to shoot. They later found a suicide note on him. Martinelli thinks Angel Navarro's case follows the same pattern, like when he stops on the highway. He's trying to see how many police officers are there. SPEAKER_02: That's not enough police officers. So he leaves again. Okay, I need more police officers. And this is referred to as guaranteeing the certainty of lethality. More police officers bring more guns. More guns mean more bullets and more opportunities to shoot at him where he would be killed instead of wounded. But the police don't have the context. Then when they first encounter Mr. Navarro, it's a classic, okay, well, we're just after a guy that stabbed somebody. That's all they think this is. We're just going to go get this guy. He's a guy that committed assault with a deadly weapon on another guy. And then all of a sudden he's stopping and they're trying to figure out, why is this guy stopping? You know? SPEAKER_04: Angel Navarro wanted the police to kill him. SPEAKER_02: And I'm going to break it down for you, forensically, okay? SPEAKER_04: Ron Martinelli is sitting at his desk. I'm next to him. He asked me if I wanted to see the tape. I said yes. I didn't ask him how many times he's watched it, frame by frame. Maybe you get numb to it after a while. SPEAKER_03: The door's open. SPEAKER_04: He's in the mood. Okay, so the collective knowledge of the officers is he's already been involved in one crime SPEAKER_02: of violence and he's got a gun. And officers are trained that 85% of all the weapons that are found on an individual concealed are found on the waistband, okay, or in the pockets. So they've told him to put his hands up and face the other way. He's not doing that. He's looking directly at them. He's trying to see, okay, where is everybody? Have they got their guns out? Look, you've got to watch his right hand. Okay, his right hand is already in his pocket. SPEAKER_04: Just getting out of the car, right hand in his pocket. SPEAKER_02: He turns a bladed side away from the officer so they can't see his right hand. He's exposed the left side of his body. He's not putting his hands up. He's moving to the waistband where officers are trained that people have concealed weapons. SPEAKER_04: The police keep shouting for Navarro to put his hands in the air, but he doesn't. He turns sideways and he reaches his hand into the pocket that's hidden from the police officers. SPEAKER_02: See what he's doing here? He's getting them all jacked up, right? He's already got that cell phone out. He was in his pocket. Now he's put it up into his waistband underneath his shirt. Okay, so here we go. So watch. This goes down super quick. See how he goes with both hands? You see he's got both hands and he starts to bring it up? Bring his cell phone up, but we don't know. SPEAKER_04: We don't know that. What do we think? He's turning towards the officers and starting to run towards them. That's exactly right. Fast, by the way. SPEAKER_02: Okay. So what? And then you'll hear that first shot. Okay, so he's already hit and he's hit abdominally. SPEAKER_04: So now he's on the ground. In Martinelli's analysis, virtually everything Navarro did was premeditated, like he had a master plan. He slashes the person in the parking lot to alert the police. Then he stops on the highway to make sure there were enough police there to kill him. Martinelli put himself inside Navarro's head. It was hard to believe, both that Martinelli could read the mind of someone he had never met and that Navarro could have planned out this elaborate deception, that he could have been so systematic and logical about his own death. I can understand why, to the Navarros, the whole thing must have seemed so baffling and horrifying. But then there's the tape, the part where Angel Navarro gets out of the car. There are police officers pointing their guns at him. And what does he do? You can see him. He pretends like his cell phone is a gun. That's the part you can't tell from just listening. He's acting it out. Then he runs at the police officers right at them. They have their guns drawn. He violates every human instinct. Okay, watch what he does now. SPEAKER_02: He's on the ground. He's been shot. He's been shot. He actually was only shot in the arm and shot in the stomach. Okay? SPEAKER_02: He says, no mortal wounds. And he knows he's not dead. But he wants to be dead. See what he does? Look how quickly he gets up. SPEAKER_02: And where's his hand? Back down to the waistband. Okay? So he is going to, you'll see him start to push that thing out again. And they're going, holy shit. SPEAKER_04: So he's still on the ground, but he has lifted up his head. Very quick. SPEAKER_02: He's lifted up his body very quickly. But look at where his hand is. He's not in a bracing position to stand up. He's into the waistband. SPEAKER_04: He doesn't stay down. He doesn't lie still. He doesn't put his hand out to lift himself up to say something or surrender. He moves his hand to his waistband as if he's reaching for a gun again. SPEAKER_02: To them, it's re-emphasizing holy criminy. SPEAKER_04: Yeah. It's on fire. It's on fire. It's on fire. It's on fire. And now he's dead. And now he's dead. The term of art in law enforcement circles for what happened to Angel Navarro is suicide by cop, SBC. 10%, maybe more, of police shootings are SBC. People don't like to talk about suicide by cop. Part of that is because we don't like to talk about suicide, period. And part is that this particular variant of suicide doesn't fit into our existing categories of police shootings. The Navarros sued the state of New Mexico for excessive force because they didn't know what happened. Then they found out. After two and a half years, the case was dismissed, perhaps not surprisingly. But that doesn't make it easier, does it? SPEAKER_11: After we got the tape and saw what happened, it was kind of like we knew, you know, it was like, well, we know they're not going to get in trouble for it. And we know that he's dead and nothing's going to bring him back. So the only option we have for any sort of justice or, yeah, like justice to have that sense of like, okay, at least they were, like, suffered consequences in some way was to sue them financially and sue them for a lot of money. SPEAKER_04: A death in the family is always hard. But this? Felipe now had to square the picture of his brother being painted by the other side with the angel he knew. SPEAKER_11: He wasn't scared to go on the monkey bars and fall and break his arm or, you know, go and run and play and get dirty in the mud. And so, you know, there were things, you know, that I admired in my brother as far as his sort of ability to be, to not care so much about what people thought and to be who he was and be okay with who he was and be outgoing and be funny and, you know, make jokes or like wasn't afraid to look stupid or embarrass himself or things that like I just never was like that. SPEAKER_11: I was always quite the opposite. SPEAKER_04: Felipe Navarro was sitting cross-legged on his couch with a throw pillow across his lap, picking at a seam. Not angry. Thoughtful. SPEAKER_11: A big thing I had to reconcile with after he passed was like, and finding out everything you, I did find out as far as like his mental health and sort of his therapy sessions because they bring out all the information like documents and stuff like that. And, you know, seeing that he had told his therapist that he was suicidal at points or he felt that he couldn't talk to his family or he felt alone or he felt depressed or, you know, he was drinking, I think he said a fifth of whiskey or something a day, you know, things that he told that none of us knew. And he, when I saw him, he seemed normal, you know, he didn't, nothing struck me as like, oh, I should, you know, make sure that he's doing okay or oh, something seems off. SPEAKER_04: That's a lot to discover after your brother gets shot. Ron Martinelli kept the video running. There was something else he wanted to show me, proof of what he meant when he said that every case was different. And then you need to clear the trunk. SPEAKER_02: Oh, we're going to clear him. SPEAKER_04: The officers run towards the stolen SUV. They need to find out if there's something else in there, someone who's another threat or in need of help. Then they go to Navarro's body on the ground and see just a cell phone, not a gun. Everything has slowed down now. The tape keeps running and running until you see the officer who discovered the cell phone start to walk in and out of the camera frame aimlessly. SPEAKER_02: I think this is the guy that... He looks shaken. ...that does it. He almost... He's like, why me? Why me? Look at him. Oh my God, leaning up against the car. SPEAKER_04: His head down. SPEAKER_02: That's what people don't see. Yeah. Not moving. He's sitting there crying is what he's doing. You know, people don't see that. See, I see that, you know. SPEAKER_04: He takes off his hat. SPEAKER_04: That's moving. SPEAKER_03: I began this three-part series on the Jesuits in Rome at the Church of the Jesu, learning SPEAKER_04: about the teachings of the founder of the Jesuit order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Saint Ignatius faced a version of the same world we face today, filled with novel problems and intractable conflict. And he gave his followers a set of moral instructions. To set aside principle, to descend into the particular, to listen closely. Why? Because only then can you fulfill one of the most important human obligations, to offer consolation to those who are suffering. The Navarro family went through a brutal two-year lawsuit to win a financial settlement, but they really weren't after money. Angel Navarro did everything he could to kill himself, but that's not what he wanted. And the police officer by the side of the road, do you think he was fine the minute the legal cloud over his conduct was lifted? The reason to watch the tape is to understand Felipe Navarro and the special pain that comes from seeing someone you love turn into someone you don't recognize. And to understand Angel Navarro and the kind of devastating illness that would lead someone to orchestrate his own death. And then you have to watch the tape to the end, to the very end, to see a police officer slumped against his squad car, shaking with tears. One shooting, three victims, all worthy of our consolation. SPEAKER_04: Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. SPEAKER_04: Suicide is a difficult topic. It can be hard for people to talk about suicide or get help if they're in danger. But there are resources available. People want to help. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is one excellent resource. It's free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day. The number in the US is 1-800-273-8255. One 800-273-TALK. Malcolm Gladwell here. 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