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Officers wounded--Man they killed was charged with hitting a man with a bat

Man also had a drug smuggling conviction
Posted at 6:45 PM, Dec 02, 2016
and last updated 2016-12-02 20:48:05-05
TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - We know more about the man killed Thursday in a gunfight with Tucson Police.
 
Jose Barron-Gomez was killed as Tucson Police officers Jorge Tequida and Doug Wilfert tried to arrest him for an outstanding arrest warrant.     
       
Both officers were wounded in the confrontation.  Officer Wilfert was treated and released. 
Officer Tequida is still in critical condition at Banner University Medical Center.
 
The shootings that left one man dead and two officers wounded relates back to an aggravated assault case and it connects to a man and a young child.
      
The original assault complaint says when Jose Barron Gomez went to visit his ex girlfriend, he saw another man holding one of his two children, lost his temper and hit the man with a bat. That man flashed a gun to chase him away. He had just minor injuries.
       
The arresting officer that day was Doug Wilfert, one of the two officers shot when they tried to arrest Barron Gomez about two months later because he had skipped court appearances in the assault case.
        
Friday candles burned outside the apartment where Barron-Gomez died.  His family did not want to talk about the incident.
          
We did not find a long criminal record for Jose Barron-Gomez but  did find one other serious crime on the man's record. About five and a half years ago Border Patrol caught him and another man in a car with almost 250 pounds of marijuana.  Instead of prison time he spent four years on supervised release but prosecutors in the recent aggravated assault case argued that earlier Federal felony should lead to stiffer penalties for the assault.
     
And it was that assault and Jose Barron-Gomez failure to show up for hearings on it that brought Officers Tequida and Wilfrert to the confrontation that would wound them and kill him.