Estevis v. Cantu, 2025 WL 1122206 (5th Cir. 2025)
“As I walked out in the streets of Laredo….” The opening line of this case review comes from an old Western song recorded by everyone from Roy Rogers and Marty Robbins to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
While patrolling the “streets of Laredo,” Officer Karla Pruneda noticed Alejandro Estevis slumped over in the driver’s seat of his truck. Pruneda proceeded to roust Estevis to check his welfare. Waking up, Estevis hit the gas and fled, leading officers on a chase that lasted two hours and reached speeds of over 100 mph. Concern about the danger prompted Laredo Police Department (LPD) leadership to tell officers to discontinue the pursuit, but a few units failed to do, leading to discipline unrelated to the outcome of this case.
Officers from other agencies successfully spiked all four tires on Estevis’s truck, slowing the pursuit to three to five miles per hour. At one point, an officer pulled up alongside Estevis to talk to him. Estevis said he had lost his family and falsely claimed that he had COVID.
With the pursuit how being conducted in “slow motion,” an LPD sergeant directed Officer Ignacio Cantu to position his car in front of Estevis’s truck and box him in from the front so officers could conduct a felony stop. Cantu misunderstood the order and rammed the truck, driving it off the road toward a fence. Meanwhile, Officer Eduardo Guajardo drove his car up to the truck to block any avenues of escape.
Estevis reversed into Guajardo’s car and began to drive forward, away from the officers. Officer Guajardo fired three shots at Estevis. A few seconds later, Estevis’s truck hit the fence. Estevis revved his engine; the wheels spun in the grass, but the truck did not move.
Officer Guajardo slowly approached the truck with his gun drawn. Estevis stopped gunning the engine, and a second later Officer Guajardo fired three more shots at Estevis (six seconds after the initial shots). Two seconds later, Officer Cantu fired three more shots. Officers staged away from the disabled truck, waiting for ballistic shields before approaching Estevis. Estevis was hit twice and paralyzed from the waist down. He sued, alleging excessive force.
The trial court granted the officers qualified immunity for the first three shots but denied it for shots four through nine. Applying the Graham v. Connor factors (the severity of the crime, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to officers or others, and whether the suspect was resisting arrest or trying to flee), the trial court ruled the first and third factors favored the officers, but the second factor was not so clear. The trial judge ruled that while Estevis posed a threat initially, the threat had diminished by the time the last six shots were fired. The court noted Estevis had stopped revving his engine, the truck was immobilized against a fence, and no officer was in the truck’s path.
The 5th Circuit reversed the trial court decision. In its ruling, the appellate court stated: “To satisfy prong two, squarely governing precedent had to place the excessiveness of shots four through nine beyond debate.” In other words, the second factor (whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to officers or others) should be resolved in favor of the officers unless there was clear precedent that a suspect in a like situation did not pose a threat. The court held Estevis had produced no relevant cases — either during trial or appeal — that “squarely” showed the officers’ conduct was wrong.
“Estevis was boxed in by police, had just rammed a police car and driven into a fence, and showed no signs of giving up,” the panel noted. “On these facts — which are plain from the videos — the officers had good reason to believe they were still under threat from an erratic suspect who seconds earlier had decided to use his truck as a 5,000-pound weapon.”
The court pointed out Estevis’s actions were analogous to facts in the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plumhoff v. Rickard (572 U.S. 765 (2014)), where officers cornered a fleeing suspect in a parking lot. When the driver spun into reverse and struck a police cruiser, and, tires spinning, tried to escape, an officer fired three shots at the suspect’s vehicle after it backed into one of the police cars. As the driver sped away, officers fired 12 more times, killing both driver and passenger. The Supreme Court held it was not “clearly established” that it was unconstitutional to shoot a fleeing driver “to protect those whom his flight might endanger.” Accordingly, the court of appeals reversed and directed the trial court to grant qualified immunity to the officers.
