It happened in his own yard, on his own reservation, as he talked on a cordless landline phone near a dirt road in Arizona.
“They ran me over, bro,” Paulo Remes can be heard saying in the 37-second video, posted by Amy Marie, which now has over 300,000 views.
Paulo managed to record the marked border patrol vehicle running him over.
“M87864,” he says, reading off the license plate number as it drives away.
It happened at Tohono O’odham Nation near the village of Topowa, about 60 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona according to Tucson.com.
“I’m doing alright; I’m just a little sore, really,” he said earlier today.
Remes explained he’d been looking for a speaker outside to listen to music with when he saw the border patrol SUV and started recording, fearing what might happen next.
“I ran into the dirt road in front of my house, because I know they’ll try and hit me,” he recalled, adding that he was speaking on a landline phone to his cousin as the vehicle approached.
So the agent driving didn’t think he was recording.
“I think he saw me on the landline and didn’t think I was recording.”
Video footage shows not only the vehicle striking Remes, it also shows the SUV driving away as Remes lay on the ground.
The SUV never turned around, or tried to check on him.
Instead, the vehicle turned on its sirens and sped away, Remes said.
“What I think he did was turn on the sirens to get away from the scene of the crime,” he recalled.
The border patrol says it is cooperating a tribal investigation into the details of the incident.
” The United States Border Patrol, Tucson Sector is fully cooperating with the Tohono O’odham Police Department as they investigate a Border Patrol agent involved vehicle incident that occurred late Thursday evening on the Tohono O’odham Nation,” Rob Daniels U.S. border patrol spokesman said in a news release.
The agency did not say whether or not it was conducting its own internal affairs investigation.
In 2006, U.S border patrol agent Cody Rouse was cleared of wrong doing by U.S. District Judge Cindy K. Jorgenson after he ran over Bennett Patricio Jr. and killed him in 2002 on Tohono O’Odham Reservation — the same reservation Remes can be seen being run over in the video above.
That incident can be read about here.
