Emily Heller, 39, wasn’t even dressed when she heard whistles alerting the neighborhood that ICE agents were in the area this morning.
“I’ve never seen someone die in front of my house before. This was horrendous,” Heller told NBC News.
Heller said she’s never been involved in activities to warn or protest the federal immigration agency, but when she walked out to her porch she said she saw six or seven ICE vehicles and a protester who had parked perpendicular to traffic.
Heller said she saw agents exit their cars and tell the driver to leave, to “get out of here.”
“And then they went up to her car and started trying to open her door, and that’s when I’m sure she got spooked and tried to flee,” Heller said. “So she reversed a little bit and then angled her wheels so she could drive away. And as she was trying to move forward, one of the ICE agents stepped in front of her vehicle and reached across the hood and fired his weapon about three or four times and shot her in the face.”
The driver crashed into a post and hit some cars and “just slumped over in her vehicle,” Heller said. She shared graphic video that shows the woman covered in blood in the driver’s seat. A man with raised arms who identified himself as a physician asked ICE agents if he could check the woman’s pulse but was denied, according to both Heller’s account and the video.
Heller said the agents wouldn’t let anyone near the scene and told people that emergency services were on the way. In the video, one agent can be heard saying, “We have our own medics.”
It took about 15 minutes for EMS to arrive, Heller estimated, because vehicles were blocking the street.
“They were on foot when they got through, and they carried her body out, just like by her limbs, they didn’t even have a stretcher,” Heller said. “She was carried out like a sack of potatoes.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. This was horrific and will change my life forever,” she said. “It’s just so terrifying. I feel so scared.”
She said she felt as if the ICE agents were untrained, inexperienced and didn’t know what they were doing. Heller said the driver was being told to leave but also being instructed to stop at the same time, then the man “just fired” his gun.
“They’re just out of their league, and they didn’t know how to handle the situation,” Heller said. “They couldn’t let somebody give life support. It was just total chaos.”
She said at times she was frightened watching the agents, some of whom were touching their guns. Heller thought in that moment, “oh … I could die,” she said.