The Marine who fatally shot a Ceres police officer and wounded another last week was a Norteņo gang member who was high on cocaine at the time and carrying a gangsta rap CD about killing, police said.
Investigators now are discounting the theory that Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress and instigated a "suicide by cop" -- provoking officers to shoot him -- because he did not want to return to Iraq.
"He had a predisposition to gangs and violence before he went into the military," Stanislaus County Sheriff's spokesman Deputy Jason Woodman said Saturday. "During our investigation, we found he wasn't due to go back to Iraq, never faced combat situations and never even fired his gun."
Raya had reportedly bragged to fellow Marines that he had bought the SKS assault rifle because its bullets could pierce police body armor, and that one of his "boys" was holding it for him, police said.
Raya's family and friends -- who deny his gang involvement -- said he had been changed by the seven months he spent in Iraq, returning in September to Camp Pendleton in San Diego. He became withdrawn and unable to hold a conversation, and told them gruesome stories of house-to-house combat and watching Marines commit suicide. He questioned the war and said he did not want to go back.
But Woodman said the sheriff's department's investigation, in conjunction with the military and other agencies, found that Raya's motor transport unit had not seen combat, though Raya was in a convoy in which a Marine in another vehicle was injured in an explosion. Raya did not seek counseling when he returned home, and had recently been transferred to a unit scheduled to be deployed to Okinawa.
The investigation also uncovered ties to the Norteņo gang, Woodman said, including a videotape and a safe in Raya's room containing a book by a member of the prison gang Nuestra Familia and numerous pictures of Raya wearing the gang's signature color red and making gang signs with his hands.
The safe also contained a "shopping list" for items including black clothing, body armor, assault rifles and ammunition.
"Based on the shopping list and the statements he made, it certainly seems like he had the intention and the desire to injure or kill police officers," Woodman said.
The video is of a Dec. 28 break-in of Ceres High School in which vandals including Raya smashed computers and other equipment, ripped up an American flag and spelled out "F -- Bush," Woodman said. The camera had been left behind at the school, but it wasn't until after the shooting that investigators got a tip to view the tape.
It also shows Raya and friends smoking marijuana, making gang signs and showing off gang graffiti. Raya refers to his gang involvement starting when he was a freshman, and pictures in the safe from 2000 show him using gang signs, Woodman said.
"It's very evident his gang affiliation started long before he joined the military," he said.
While Raya had a minor criminal record as a juvenile, police had not identified him as a gang member.
Raya's family and friends denied that he was a gang member but said he may have known people who were.
"They have to say something bad. They can't say something good because he killed one of their partners," Raya's uncle, Nicholas Cortez of Modesto, said of the police. "I'm not saying he was a saint, but he did go to the armed forces and got some medals for it."
"The military trained him to kill. Let's say he didn't see combat, but he was there," Cortez said. He said "stress from the service" is the only explanation for Raya's actions.
An autopsy showed Raya had a "significant amount" of cocaine in his system, Woodman said. In the pocket of Raya's poncho, police also found the CD "Season of Da Siccness," containing numerous references to death including the songs "Dead Man" and "Welcome to Your Own Death."
Woodman said investigators may never know what motivated Raya to open fire on police, but he said they consider suicide by cop and post-traumatic stress "less and less likely."
Denver Mills, director of the Concord VA Vet Center, said post-traumatic stress "typically doesn't result in lethal behavior like this." But he said it's impossible to say what affect the war had on Raya, even if he wasn't in combat.
"The difficulty," said Woodman, "is you have a guy who killed a cop, and the only one who seemed to know why was him."
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