The chief city councilor in the Maine city where a federal immigration agent fatally shot an immigrant says it’s time to dismantle a makeshift public memorial.
“For me, the bottom line is that the time for the temporary memorial has come to an end,” Biddeford City Council President Roger Beaupre said in a statement Tuesday night.
Mechanics Park, where the makeshift memorial to Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero sprouted up, “is a shared community space and not for standard or even permanent unauthorized or ad hoc memorials,” Beaupre told fellow councilors.
Beaupre, a former longtime Biddeford Police chief, offered his first public comments pertaining to the ICE shooting death on July 13, according to Biddeford Buzz.
He called on city councilors to review municipal parks rules to make sure they more clearly delineate allowed uses.
“There should be an ordinance that governs both temporary and permanent memorials,” he said.
In calling for the memorial’s dismantling, Beaupre said the park where it’s located “should be a welcoming spot to everyone.
“Parks belong to an entire community and should not formally or informally be occupied by any group or any one political perspective for an extended period,” he said.
In his wide-ranging remarks, the Biddeford native and veteran former city cop faulted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to train its thousands of recruits.
“There is no godly way you can hire that many people and train them adequately to deal with situations such as this,” he said of the July 13 confrontation between the federal agency and a Colombian national living in Biddeford.
Beaupre also said the ICE agents poorly executed the tactics that should have been followed during a gunpoint traffic stop that led to the fatal shooting of what he called “the wrong man.”
Federal officials have acknowledged that Guerrero was not the suspect they were looking for when they killed him while trying to stop his car.
