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The ICE agent who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has dealt with serious mental health issues since childhood and should never have been given a badge and a gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.
David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of having assaulted women in his life over the years, and one of them shared with the AP a voicemail from last winter in which he told her he believed someone should slit her throat.
Brouillette’s troubled past calls into further question the rigor with which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has vetted new recruits, as part of its mass hiring campaign to help carry out President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump implemented those measures upon returning to office, including Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man shot to death by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine.
The DHS, which has not released the name of the agent who killed Durán Guerrero, has stated that “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an agent discharged their weapon”.
Brouillette did not respond to text messages or an email requesting comment. Three relatives who said they spoke with him since the shooting, including an ex-wife and a daughter, noted that he told them he acted in self-defense.
Asked to comment on Brouillette's history and his role in Monday's shooting, Lauren Bis, an ICE spokesperson, said in a statement: “We will never confirm or deny attempts to reveal the identity of our law enforcement officers,” adding that “the ICE agent in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training, including use-of-force training”.
The White House referred all questions about the shooting and Brouillette to ICE.
Una nueva carrera en el ICE
Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that ICE had hired him. She explained that, due to his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was going through a difficult mental health episode and did not believe him. She did not realize he was telling the truth until this week, when videos of the moments related to the shooting began circulating online.
Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the news agency that her father called her Wednesday and told her he shot and killed the young Colombian man.
David and Ashley Brouillette were high school sweethearts and married in 2007. She recounted that she divorced him in 2009 because he had become physically violent with her, something that started after she became pregnant with their daughter.
According to Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their daughter, an episode also recalled by her mother, Avis Collins.
The abuse continued after she left him, she asserted.
David Brouillette does not appear to have a criminal record in Maine, as a check with the state's Department of Public Safety yielded no records under his name.
But hundreds of family court files obtained at the clerk's office of the Augusta District Court detail years of accusations of physical and verbal abuse filed by his second ex-wife on behalf of herself and their daughters.
This ex-wife—whose name the AP is not providing because she fears retaliation—alleged that he had stalked and harassed her, and that he had physically and verbally abused their daughter, according to several temporary protection order requests. Brouillette knocked over his teenage daughter and mashed spaghetti into her hair and, during another fit of rage, dragged his daughter through the house while she cried, she maintained.
“Dave needs therapy or something for his PTSD and depression,” she wrote in a temporary protection order request on behalf of her teenage daughter, which a judge granted in 2021.
In court documents, David Brouillette stated that his second ex-wife had defamed him.
His eldest daughter, Madison Brouillette, said she was also a witness to her father's volatility.
“I saw my dad struggle with a lot of things,” she told the AP. She said that she once came home from school and he told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun pointed at his head.
“If you don’t really, truly take care of yourself, there’s no way you can protect other people. And with my dad, he never wanted to seek help,” she stated.
A direct relative of David Brouillette, who spoke on condition that their name not be used, said that as a child he was diagnosed with manic bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, a diagnosis Ashley Brouillette confirmed. The relative described him as someone with a “severe mental illness,” noting that he attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized on several occasions.
The relative indicated that they have been estranged for years, after cutting off contact because they feared he would harm them. This week he did not respond to their attempts to communicate, the relative added.
A military career and aspirations to work in law enforcement
Growing up in Gardiner, a city of about 6,000 residents about 60 miles northwest of Biddeford—where Monday's shots were fired—David Brouillette was highly drawn to the armed forces and police, his relatives said.
School yearbook photos show he was a member of the Naval Junior ROTC program—a leadership and naval science education program for high school students—at his school, and wrote that he planned to go to college and become a police officer.
Initially, military recruiters rejected him due to his mental health diagnoses, but encouraged him to go off his medication for a year and reapply, which he did, according to his direct relative. Eventually, he was able to enlist.
According to U.S. military records, Brouillette enlisted as a chemical equipment repairer in the Maine Army National Guard, but later changed positions to become a medical logistics specialist. He served in the Guard from November 2007 to January 2010, according to records provided by the Pentagon.
A 2009 article in the Kennebec Journal mentioned Brouillette as a private in the 152nd Maintenance Company of the Maine Army National Guard, in Augusta.
In January 2010 he joined the Army as a human intelligence collector. Brouillette was deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013, and finally left the Army with the rank of sergeant in December 2015.
His direct relative believes the time Brouillette spent abroad worsened his emotional difficulties: “Afghanistan destroyed him: it trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who had a severe mental illness and turned him into a killing machine.”
La vida después del Ejército
In March 2025, Brouillette passed an exam to become a real estate agent. His license was active until December. In a Facebook post, Realty of Maine announced that Brouillette would work in the firm's office in the city of Bangor.
“David lives in Maine after retiring from the U.S. Army,” said the post, which has been deleted. Brouillette is no longer listed as an agent on the company's website. Messages were left at Realty of Maine requesting comment.
In March, the Maine agency that manages child support issues filed a lien against him, public records show. That filing suggests that Brouillette could have been in the process of receiving a settlement for permanent incapacity or disability.
In late 2025, around the time he joined ICE, his ex-wife Ashley said he left her a three-minute voicemail, in which he mocked her for having requested a restraining order against him. According to the message she shared with the AP, he repeatedly called her “disgusting,” and suggested that she and the other women and girls in her “lineage” should die.
“And all of you should have your f——ing throats slit,” said the voicemail, from which vulgar words have been omitted. “Yeah, you should. Am I threatening that I am going to do it? No. No. But do I think they should have their f——ing throats slit? Or that they should have had them slit? Yeah.”
She said she cut off contact with him until Wednesday, when his photo began circulating online.
She contacted his current wife via Facebook and they spoke on the phone for several minutes. Her ex-husband spoke with her, according to screenshots of the phone exchange she shared with the AP. He acknowledged that he had shot Durán Guerrero to death.
“He was asking if I could tell them that he was a good person and not talk about the abuse or the things that I had endured with him, and said that the most important thing now is his character,” she recounted.
She said he told her that he is now in hiding, under protective custody.
“I asked him why he did it,” she related. “He said it was a justified shooting. That the guy was trying to run him over with a car.”
His daughter also said he assured her the shooting was justified.
“I don’t think he sees himself as a murderer,” expressed Madison Brouillette.
“I think he thinks that he genuinely did the right thing,” she added. “The only thing he said was that he did what he had to do. He said he had to protect himself.”
[Publicidad]