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Was 911 call used for suicide?

 
Published Oct. 29, 1994|Updated Oct. 8, 2005

If Juan Enrique Garcia wanted to commit suicide, he picked an unusual way to do it.

Garcia, 30, was shot and killed by a Hillsborough Sheriff's deputy at 3 a.m. Oct. 15 when he refused to drop a realistic, but fake, pistol.

Now officials say that it was Garcia himself who called 911 to report a bogus domestic violence call that brought deputies to his front door.

Sheriff's investigators were perplexed by the shooting from the start; why would a man point a toy gun at an armed deputy? And they were confused as well by the identity of the calm man who called 911.

They played the tape for Garcia's girlfriend's parents and his two brothers and all of them identified Garcia as the person who made the call from a pay phone at the Flying Cloud Mobile Home Park at 14205 N Nebraska Ave.

On the 911 tape, Garcia tells the dispatcher:

"He has a knife on his wife. He's kicking her."

The dispatcher asks where this is happening and Garcia gives his own address, Lot 34A.

"Is he a big guy?" the dispatcher asks.

"Oh, no. He's not big. He's skinny," Garcia says.

"Are you a neighbor?"

"Not really," Garcia says, beginning to laugh.

When deputies arrived, they approached Garcia who was standing on his screened-in porch. Garcia, who had a blood-alcohol level three times more than the point at which someone is presumed to be impaired, walked inside.

He walked outside and pointed the replica 9mm handgun at Dep. Kenneth Ratcliff, who ordered him to drop the gun. He refused and Ratcliff shot him to death with two real bullets.

"He set the whole thing in motion," sheriff's spokesman Jack Espinosa said. "Why would you do that?"

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