Hours before he was fatally shot by Thornton police officers in Lakewood, Joby Vigil was pulling dandelions in his aunt’s yard in west Denver.
Vigil, 31, worked at Denver day shelter Haven of Hope and often helped out family, neighbors and even acquaintances who were down on their luck, his parents Frank and Deanine Vigil told The Denver Post.
Joby Vigil had been helping out his new friend Jasmine Castro with the occasional meal and letting her do laundry at the Vigil family’s home in Barnum West. The Vigils said the pair had met through friends about a month before the fatal police encounter on April 30.
After Vigil finished pulling weeds across the street, he came inside, placed an empty glass with the dregs of chocolate milk in the sink and said goodbye to his parents.
He and Castro were going to pick up some tires he bought for his Camaro on Facebook Marketplace, Vigil told his parents. He told them he loved them and that he would see them after work tomorrow.
But when Frank Vigil woke up and started watching the 6 a.m. news the next day, he recognized the car involved in a police shooting in Lakewood. It looked like Castro’s car.
He couldn’t wait to find out what happened, so he drove to the scene at Second Avenue and Garrison Street, where police confirmed his son was killed.
“We’re lost,” Frank Vigil said in an interview with the Post in early June. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”
Deanine and Frank Vigil initially didn’t want their son’s name made public and asked the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office to not release it.
But they changed their minds after they obtained body-worn camera footage of the shooting from the Thornton Police Department.
“He was executed,” Frank Vigil said. “He never had a chance to put his hands up.”
Both Vigil and Castro had previous convictions for aggravated motor vehicle theft, but Thornton police have not said whether officers knew who was in the car when they began following it around 2:40 a.m. April 30. Vigil’s family told The Post there was no way police could have known.
“The cops had no clue who they were hunting, his past or the future they stole from him,” said Vigil’s sister, Regina Ortega.
Officers in unmarked vehicles started following a car with no license plates near East 84th Avenue and Washington Street in Thornton, police officials said in a news release.
Officers followed the car to 70th Avenue and Broadway in unincorporated Adams County, where they attempted a traffic stop, but the driver refused to stop. Thornton police continued to follow the car into Lakewood, when someone in the car got out near Alameda Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard and shot at officers, according to the department. Police have not said whether the driver or a passenger is the person who shot at them.
Thornton police began pursuing the car with lights and sirens before crashing into it and ending the chase near Second Avenue and Garrison Street. One person with a gun exited the driver’s side window — body-worn camera footage later showed it was Castro — followed by Vigil. Officers shot both Castro and Vigil, and both died at the scene.
Thornton police released a few seconds of the shooting captured on body-worn cameras in a video briefing on May 28.
Videos obtained by the Vigils and reviewed by The Denver Post provide more details about the minutes before and after the shooting.
Body-worn camera footage of the 20 minutes before the shooting doesn’t show the initial shooting at officers. Most of the footage is a view of a steering wheel or dashboard, and the audio is muted.
When the audio starts playing, police were chasing down the car and one officer can be heard saying “He’s going to bail out here and shoot at us. Hit him.”
Once police brought the car to a stop and Castro began climbing out of the car, approximately two seconds elapsed from when officers commanded Castro to put her hands up and when they started shooting.
Joby Vigil was still halfway inside the car and not visible when police began shooting, according to the video footage. The shooting lasted less than 10 seconds.
Both Castro and Vigil lay motionless on the ground as police approached and handcuffed Castro.
While standing over Vigil with their guns trained on him, one officer said they would shoot him if he turned over because they couldn’t see underneath him to tell whether he had a gun.
After seeing a gunshot wound to his head, an officer said, “We’re good here, he’s DOA (dead on arrival)” and handcuffed him.
It took nearly three minutes for police to start CPR on Castro. No officers are seen performing any emergency medical aid on Vigil.
Nearly five minutes after the shooting, officers stood nearby when one officer told another that Vigil was still breathing.
“…You might want to do some CPR on him even though he’s got that huge hole in his head,” the officer said.
The second officer stated the fire department just arrived, and neither moved to help Vigil.
Frank and Deanine Vigil said the body-worn camera footage confirmed that their son was innocent of any wrongdoing.
They want the police officers involved to lose their jobs and to never work in law enforcement again.
“They should have never let this happen,” Frank Vigil said.
“We’re supposed to look to the police for help, but who helps us from the police?” Deanine Vigil said.
Thornton Police Department spokesperson Joe Walker declined to answer most questions about the shooting, citing the open criminal investigation through the Jefferson County Critical Incident Response Team.
Walker also declined to release the names of the officers involved, citing standard procedure.
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