SAN ANTONIO — A witness who claims they saw San Antonio police arrest 19-year-old Jesus Gonzales on the northwest side Sunday said they thought the incident went down smoothly.
The arrest, which happened near a restaurant in the 8100 block of Tezel Road happened just before noon.
About an hour later, Gonzales was dead from what the Medical Examiner has ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound, while he was in the secure booking area inside the Bexar County Jail.
In an explanation of the case police provided Monday morning, they wrote that "an officer arrested and searched the suspect. The suspect was placed in the patrol car and was buckled in. The handling officer arrived at the BCSO jail and gave custody of the suspect to jail personnel."
Later Monday, police provided a supplemental report written by one of four officers involved in the incident.
That report states while Gonzales was handcuffed, an officer searched his pockets.
The report does not mention whether any pat downs took place to check other parts of the man's clothing. The officer also wrote that he was instructed to provide his body worn camera video of the incident.
Once at the jail, Sheriff Javier Salazar said things took a deadly turn when Gonzales was being searched during the booking process.
Salazar said the man removed his shirt and then when he was told to remove his pants, he pulled out a gun from deep within his clothing and shot himself just a few feet away from a jailer who was essentially unarmed.
A review of criminal records on the Bexar County website reveals Gonzales has at least six previous arrests, with five of them involving assaultive behavior.
The sixth was a charge of unlawfully carrying a weapon, which was dismissed January 25th.
Additionally, on February 13th, just 20 days ago, Gonzales entered a no contest plea to a charge of assaulting emergency service personnel and he was given deferred adjudication and released from jail.
Both SAPD and Salazar said they are running independent but concurrent investigations about when, how, and what went wrong.
There is no timeline on how long that might take.
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