Since Mike Vega was given a “Positive Self-Talk Card” at a Street Survival Seminar a couple of years ago, he’s made it part of his daily ritual of preparing for work. Printed on the front of this thin, wallet-size piece of plastic are 13 “affirmations” designed to help an officer psyche up for patrol:
I will survive on any high-risk call...I know the tactics I need...I am skilled with my firearms...I can use deadly force to save my life or the life of someone else, and so on.
Vega religiously reads the list before every shift and carries the card clipped to the visor of his unit. “You never know when your day will come,” he says.
But Vega patrols in Hatch, N.M., a sleepy village of 1,600 some 80 miles from the Mexican border. The P.D. has seven full-time officers and one part-timer, and the biggest event there normally is the annual chili festival. So Vega had never needed to use the card’s flip side, with its suggestions for getting through the first night after a critical incident.
Until one Saturday evening this autumn, when he grabbed a call of a fight in progress...
At 36, Vega has held two jobs in law enforcement since being certified as a peace officer in 2002. After an initial stint with the Lincoln County (N.M.) Sheriff’s Dept., he signed on with Hatch P.D., where for the last four years he has combined regular patrol duties with service as the agency’s narcotics K-9 handler.
He was patrolling with his German shepherd Elmo that Saturday night when his preparation for the unexpected was tested. In an interview with Police1, he explained in detail for the first time outside official circles what happened.
“I’d just come off a seven-day vacation, my first shift back,” Vega says. “I was the only Hatch officer on the street.”
Just before 1900 hours, the Dona Ana Sheriff’s Dept., which patrols the area surrounding Hatch, received a report from an unknown caller that “a fight was going on” outside a house about two miles outside of town. No details were available.
The S.D. and the P.D. monitor each other’s frequencies and routinely serve as each other’s backup, so Vega radioed that he’d be responding with Deputy Eric Lopez, who’d been assigned the call.
Vega was closer, so he arrived first at the remote residence, set among a few other houses amid chili and hay fields near the intersection of a paved road and a dirt road.
When he got within about 50 yards of the place, he could see ahead in his high-beams “a bunch of guys in jeans and t-shirts piling into two cars out front.” One sped off to the north, the other headed west on the dirt road.
Vega roared after that one and radioed Lopez about the other. “It was dark, so I couldn’t see who was inside,” he recalls. “The car was kicking up so much dust I was lucky if I could even track its taillights ahead of me.”
As he bounced along the road, his cell phone rang. A “close family friend” was calling, he believes from inside the house where the fight had been reported. She apparently was visiting there socially and had seen his unit arrive outside. She wanted to warn him.
“The car you’re chasing...the guy possibly has a gun,” she said, then hung up.
Vega remembers: “That kicked my mind-set to a new level. All the flags went up then.”
The pursuit, leading away from farmland and out into the desert, lasted only two or three miles—“a really fast two or three miles,” Vega says—then ended abruptly when the suspect vehicle pulled to the roadside and stopped.
“It was pitch black except for my lights, lots of dust, the middle of nowhere,” Vega says. But as he pulled up, he could see five males clamber from the car. Two ran into the desert and quickly disappeared. The others were gathering near the rear of the vehicle, waiting for him.
He urgently radioed Lopez to come ASAP, but the deputy was at least five minutes out.
Exiting his unit, Vega yelled at the trio: “Stay where you’re at!” He now recognized them all—two teenagers and an adult in his 20s—as people he’d encountered on previous police business, including traffic stops and domestics. “I was puzzled about what was going on,” he says, but he had little time to contemplate it.
He could see no weapons, but the trio advanced toward him menacingly, shouting threats and epithets. “We’re gonna kick your ass!”...“What’re you after us for? We didn’t do nothin’!”...“Fuck you! We’re gonna bust you up!”
At the front of his patrol car, Vega snapped open his ASP expandable and struck the advancing older male on the left side. The three retreated a bit, and Vega pulled back to the driver side of his unit, his H&K USP .45 pistol now in hand.
Suddenly, a new threat from a different direction. From the desert out beyond the passenger side of his unit, “rocks started flying in toward me. They rained down on my unit, they rained down around me.” The pelting goaded Elmo into a frenzy of barking and agitation, and Vega pressed close against the side of the patrol car to keep from being struck directly.
What was he thinking at that moment? “Honestly? Oh, shit. How am I going to get out of this?
“It was a very tense situation. I thought about letting Elmo out for a very short second, but that would mean I’d have to take my eyes off the bad guys, so I quickly forgot that idea.”
The rock storm and the fragile standoff with the threatening trio, who started inching toward him again, went on for what seemed like “an eternity.” Then without warning, one of the fugitives from the desert, later identified as 32-year-old Javier Soto, appeared out of the darkness.
“He came up on my front passenger side in a fighting position,” Vega says. Like the others, he was spewing threats “about beating my ass and fucking me up.” He started to walk toward the rear of Vega’s unit, evidently to circle around the trunk. The three others aggressively moved toward the officer from the front.
At that moment, with “perfect timing,” Lopez slid to a stop at the scene in a cloud of dust.
Things happened so quickly then that they were difficult for Vega to grasp in full detail. In macro, he knows that Lopez racked his 12 gauge, and the sound sent the trio diving for the dirt. But Soto kept coming toward Lopez. Holding the shotgun in his off hand, the deputy fired a Taser in an effort to stop the suspect, but only one barb hit him and he continued to advance.
Soto clutched a rock “about the size of a softball” in his hand and Vega was certain that he intended to attack the deputy with it. Vega raised his pistol, pointed it across the car at Soto, and squeezed the trigger.
He thought he fired two rounds, but later he discovered that he fired three. All hit, two in the chest, one in the throat. “He went down,” Vega says. “It was over—for him at least.”
Before long, the trio was handcuffed and in custody; they would be charged with assaulting a peace officer, resisting, and other offenses. Although he was dead at the scene, Soto, an ex-con with an extensive criminal background, was hooked up too, as a precaution. Border Patrol agents from the area, expert man-trackers, located the fifth suspect, an adult male, in the desert, attempting to hide behind scrub bushes. No weapon other than Soto’s rock was found, and the arrestees offered no explanation about the alleged fight.
Vega now faced the aftermath of the first shooting of his career, which included automatic administrative leave and an investigation headed by the New Mexico State Police.
The Positive Self-Talk Card became his guide for the rest of the night and for the nights and days that followed.
The affirmations on the front having successfully been confirmed in action, he turned to the backside with its recommendations for achieving emotional balance once an immediate life threat is over.
Vega received the card at a Calibre Press Street Survival Seminar in Las Cruces, N.M. in 2006. Since the 1980s, it has been included in the registration packet that every Seminar attendee receives.
Based on input from law enforcement psychologists and other behavioral scientists, the card advises:
1. Implement calming techniques.
2. Watch your beverage selection.
3. Start talking it out.
4. Ignore the media.
5. Use “routine” to your advantage.
Vega followed all these suggestions. He instituted a deep “combat breathing” technique taught at the Seminar to stabilize his stressed mind and body. He drank “nothing but water,” avoiding alcohol and any elevated intake of coffee. He talked with his wife about his emotional swings after the shooting, ranging from ecstasy at being alive to sadness at having had to take a human life. His department cooperated in “keeping the media off my back.” And while “it was difficult” because of the emotional impact of the event, his work disruption, and a certain anxiety over the investigation, he tried to maintain his normal habits and activities as faithfully as possible.
His wife read the card, too, and tried to adhere to its principles, and to the extent that was relevant and practical, they worked together to encompass their three sons, ages one, four, and 15.
“It’s amazing how that little card helped us get through this,” Vega says.
“Before the shooting, my wife never understood why I left the house in a different mental mode when I went to work. I was getting focused on what might happen out there and what I might need to do to respond. She thought I was just shutting her out. But after I went over the card with her, front and back, she understood.”
Recently, the official investigation was completed and D.A. Susana Martinez declared that Vega was fully justified in using lethal force, in defense of Deputy Lopez’s life.
On the family front, Vega says, “the hugs and kisses are a lot longer.” On the street, he’s back to dealing with “normal stuff.”
The plastic card still rides with him. “I hope that will be my last shooting,” he says, “but if it isn’t, I’ll be prepared...and I’ll still have that card along.”
Actually, he’ll have a different one. When Mandy Houston, customer care manager for Calibre Press and Police1, heard that Vega’s card from the Seminar has been “almost worn to pieces from so much handling,” she quickly put a replacement in the mail to him.
