EULESS -- Jorge Brian Gonzalez claimed he was God and told a police officer he wanted to kill him.
He was high and acting crazy as Euless police officer W. Tice rode with Gonzalez in an ambulance to a Fort Worth hospital. He talked to cameras he thought were hidden in the interior lights. He said he could control helicopters that he believed were flying overhead.
As he was rolled into John Peter Smith Hospital on a stretcher, Gonzalez’s behavior became more threatening, according to a Feb. 21 police report obtained by the Star-Telegram.
Tice wrote that he saw Gonzalez “looking at a police officer’s pistol who had his back to Brian as he passed.
“I moved the stretcher wide of the officer,” Tice wrote in the report. “Brian looked at me and said, ‘You saw me looking at this gun. I was going to take it.’”
A doctor at JPS diagnosed Gonzalez with having homicidal thoughts and numerous drug-related disorders, according to discharge papers. He was released from the hospital on Feb. 23, one day before he turned 22.
Eight days later, Gonzalez fatally shot Euless officer David Hofer in a neighborhood park, and then was killed by other officers responding to the March 1 shooting.
Police Chief Michael Brown wrote in the Euless Citizens Police Academy April newsletter that Gonzalez was a “cold-blooded killer” who was going to take out as many people as possible.
“I don’t think we will ever know the motivating force that drove the suspect to kill Officer Hofer,” Brown wrote. “I do believe that his intent was to inflict even more death, damage and destruction in the park than he did.”
Brown said police continue to conduct separate investigations into the shooting. One delves deep into the shooting and will be turned over to the Tarrant County district attorney’s office. The other looks at police procedures to determine if policies were followed.
Because those investigations are active, Euless police have declined to discuss Gonzalez’s case. But police reports and other documents provided by his father detail his son’s dark life, scarred by sexual abuse, steady drug use and petty crimes — leaving behind more questions than answers.
“This was a tragedy for the officer’s family, for the law enforcement community and a life so young that is lost,” said Alex del Carmen, a criminologist and executive director of Tarleton State University’s School of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Strategic Studies. “What could we have done as a society to prevent that?”
And at no time was Gonzalez’s self-destructive path more clear than on Feb. 21.
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