Footage has surfaced featuring the deadly shootout between two bounty hunters and a Minnesota fugitive they were pursuing. Bounty hunters Fidel Garcia Jr. and Gabriel Bernal were both left dead, along with fugitive Ramon Hutchinson, following a firefight at a car dealership in Greenville, Texas on Tuesday.
What Happened?
A bystander recorded the video showing Garcia and Bernal holding up their guns as they corner Hutchinson in a glassed in office on the showroom floor. As the bounty hunters close in on Hutchinson, the men begin yelling at each other while a woman who was in the office shouts “No!.”
What follows is a rapid exchange of gunfire as the bystander recording the incident drops to the floors and flees the scene.
Hutchinson was wanted on felony charges of disarming a police officer, fourth-degree assault of an officer and felony first-degree narcotics possession, according to private Minnesota-based company US Fugitive Recovery and Extradition.
Hutchinson was wanted since he failed to show for a March court date in Minneapolis, forfeiting a $50,000 bond. Normally, bounty hunters take around a 10% fee of total bail bond for successful recovery of a fugitive.
Garcia and Bernal were licensed private investigators in Corpus Christi who were hired to recover the fugitive following a tip that he was in Texas.
CBS DFW reports that the bounty hunters put a tracking device on a car they believed to be Hutchinson’s who was thought to be staying with his girlfriend. But when the pair learned Hutchinson was planning to trade in his vehicle at a Nissan dealership in Greenville, they chose to act.
According to dealership owner Rick Ford, the two men came in and announced that they were federal agents. Though bounty hunters have broad powers of arrest and search under the law on behalf of bail-bondsmen, they are not government agents.
“We were told they were federal agents so we didn’t ask them to leave,” Ford said. “They were dressed casual. We thought they were plainclothes officers.”
After three to four hours, Hutchinson and his girlfriend arrived at the dealership where the bounty hunters produced handcuffs. At this point, the fugitive drew a gun and a firefight broke out.
No one else was injured.
