An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings | WIRED

Overview

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings

The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED.

Details

David S. Norman, the founder and proprietor of law enforcement training firm Tru Kinetics LLC, served as a Phoenix Police officer from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2020. Prior to founding Tru Kinetics the same year, according to records reviewed by WIRED, Norman was involved in six shootings while on duty that left four people dead and two more wounded. In every instance, the Phoenix Police Department said Norman fired on an armed suspect and exchanged volleys of gunfire in at least two of the shootings.

Based in Gilbert, Arizona, Tru Kinetics offers training on small-team tactics, hostage rescues, close-quarters combat, building searches, night-vision firearms proficiency, pistol and rifle courses, “vehicle interdiction,” breaching with explosives, and sniper tactics, according to the company’s website.

Tru Kinetics received $27,748 for a year-long contract to run a mandatory 40-hour training course that certain members of Department of Homeland Security Special Response Teams receive annually at Fort Benning in Georgia, according to government procurement records reviewed by WIRED. At least 700 SRT agents from the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, and ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office units pass through Fort Benning for annual training.

In an interview with WIRED, Norman says that his company conducted sessions with the Special Response Team from Arizona’s Homeland Security Investigations office. “They’re top dudes, and it was an honor to work with them,” he tells WIRED. Norman maintains that his courses, which took place in Arizona and Georgia’s Fort Benning, did not involve crowd control tactics or active shooters, but would not specify further. “It sounds like you’re one of those dudes who’s doing a hit piece on HSI,” he says.

Tru Kinetics posted two photos to Instagram in August 2024 of Norman and three Tru Kinetics trainers alongside 19 uniformed operators from HSI’s Arizona Special Response Team, posing in a “kill house” training course—a set of rooms and hallways filled with obstacles and targets designed to simulate close-quarters combat.

Customs and Border Protection did not respond to WIRED’s questions about how many SRT teams and operators went through the Gilbert, Arizona, company’s training course.

In a 2021 law enforcement podcast, The Modern Cop, Norman describes himself as “a fucking savage” who sought out high-risk experiences and shootings as a cop. “I wanted these experiences. I was super aggressive,” Norman said. He also appeared to joke about police shootings, telling the host that “you kind of hope it’s on your Friday, so you can actually have days off.”

Once reserved for armed or high-risk suspects, manhunts, and potentially dangerous building entries, the SRTs are now being used for civil immigration enforcement, crowd control, and basic warrant service, operations that the unit was once restricted from performing. Both Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed while protesting the militarized federal immigration surges in Minnesota, with SRT members implicated in both of their deaths. While recent debate over Homeland Security’s violent immigration sweeps have focused on whether agents receive adequate training, the background of SRT’s training contractor raises questions about who is training ICE’s and CBP’s paramilitary units, and what they are being trained to do.

For a dozen years of Norman’s two decades as a Phoenix cop, he served on the agency’s Special Assignments Unit, a plainclothes fugitive apprehension team that Norman repeatedly characterized in a 2021 deposition from a lawsuit filed the previous year as having morphed into what was considered a “SWAT” (special weapons and tactics) team. On those units, he worked as a “point cover” man and at times doubled up as a trainer on pistol usage for units within Phoenix PD, according to his deposition and Phoenix Police documents reviewed by WIRED.

In addition to Tru Kinetics, Norman has worked as an “independent contractor for the Department of Defense” and provided training under a nondisclosure agreement, according to his deposition.

Norman’s supervisors consistently gave him solid ratings and he received numerous department commendations. The four fatal shootings he was involved in were deemed in policy by both the local district attorney and Phoenix PD. However, in the 2021 deposition, Norman testified that he was formally reprimanded for a number of incidents, including an admonishment around 2005 after an “inappropriate photo” was taken of him in uniform along with a number of unidentified women. Records show that he also was involved in a pursuit while in an unmarked vehicle in 2013, then a violation of Phoenix Police policy. In his deposition, Norman said that “a written reprimand is not that big a deal.”

In 2018, Phoenix PD was the deadliest in the country, with 23 individuals killed in 44 police shooting incidents. That rate also led US law enforcement agencies, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database. That year, Norman shot two people, one fatally. A number of other officers assigned to the same plainclothes unit as Norman were also involved in multiple shooting incidents, per the Arizona Republic’s reporting on Phoenix PD shootings.

In 2020, Norman and officer Kristopher Bertz were sued by the family of Jacob Harris, a robbery suspect who was killed in 2019 while driving away from what police say was an attempted restaurant holdup. The plainclothes unit Norman and Bertz were part of had placed Harris and his friends under surveillance for what the police believed were a series of similar suspected robberies. The officers opened fire on Harris as he fled from a vehicle that was disabled by Norman with a grappling hook; Norman fired four shots and Bertz fired the rounds that killed Harris. Police claimed a handgun was found in the vicinity of the shooting.

A motion for a summary judgement in the wrongful death lawsuit was granted in 2022, and the lawsuit was terminated.

When asked about the circumstances of the Harris shooting and the attendant lawsuit, Norman claimed there was “no controversy on that shooting—the family was looking for a payout and the judge saw through that.”

“Just because one loudmouth wants to make it an issue,” he says, “doesn’t mean there is one.”

The Phoenix Police Department considered Norman a valued member and repeatedly lavished him with praise in annual evaluations. “Throughout this year I have seen you continually push the boundaries both during critical incidents, training and the standard upon which you hold yourself and your peers,” wrote Jeffrey Clement, Norman’s supervisor in the Special Apprehensions Unit, in a October 2018 performance evaluation, during a period when Clement wrote that Phoenix police witnessed an “unprecedented” number of assaults on police. “You have truly made this unit better than it was from when you arrived and that impression does not go unnoticed.”

The Phoenix PD’s overall high rate of police shootings, along with the brutality of city cops towards the homeless population, prompted the US Department of Justice to open a civil rights probe into the agency in August 2021. In June 2024, federal investigators probing the practices of Phoenix PD as a whole issued a findings report establishing a “pattern or practice” of violent, unconstitutional policing in Arizona’s largest city, including unjustified uses of lethal force.

The 2024 report found alarming patterns, including Phoenix PD’s abuse of protesters, the wholesale fabrication of an “ACAB Gang” that was unsuccessfully prosecuted on conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, and a use-of-force training regimen the DOJ said was so broken that it taught officers that “all force—even deadly force—is de-escalation.” However, the Trump administration retracted the findings of constitutional violations in May 2025, letting Phoenix off the hook for the sort of binding, court-ordered police reforms that cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Baltimore, and New Orleans have undergone as a result of similar cases.

In an interview with WIRED, Steve Benedetto, a Phoenix civil rights attorney who represented Harris’ family in their lawsuit, calls Norman’s unit “a group of plainclothes cowboys” who watched Harris and his companions commit a robbery, then engaged them in a high-speed pursuit. “Norman stood out to me as especially aggressive,” Benedetto says, adding that the Special Assignments Unit’s hard-charging tactics were “typical” of Phoenix PD’s broader ethos. “He’s the last guy on earth who should be training a tactical team.”

Special Response Teams, along with the Border Patrol’s BORTAC and BORSTAR paramilitary units, have been at the heart of clashes with protesters during DHS’s militarized sweeps in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In the fatal shootings of both Good and Pretti, the tactics of the SRT officers raised questions: SRT agent Jonathan Ross walked in front of Good’s SUV while recording with a cell phone before drawing his pistol and firing four rounds into her SUV. In the Pretti shooting, a Sig Sauer pistol the ICU nurse legally possessed was taken from his belt holster by a federal agent as several others dogpiled on top of him. Even after viewing multiple videos of the incident and speaking with other law enforcement officials, it is unclear whether Pretti’s gun misfired or if something else caused CBP SRT operator Raymundo Gutierrez and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa to shoot him several times.

Border Patrol’s BORTAC and BORSTAR paramilitary units

John Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, tells WIRED that the SRT teams have been used by the Trump administration for the sort of roving patrols and clashes with demonstrators that are markedly different than the targeted arrests they typically make.

“The general idea of SRTs is that they’d be used against people who posed a significant risk to public safety: those with a violent criminal history, gang association, or other factors that would be the objective basis for an elevated risk assessment,” Sandweg says. “What are we doing deploying them to deal with protesters? It’s a recipe for disaster.”

In recent months, the mass deployment of Homeland Security paramilitary units for immigration surges has markedly decreased after nationwide outrage over the killings of Good and Pretti. High-profile administration figures like former Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem were removed from their positions amid the backlash this winter and spring, while immigration enforcement operations since Minnesota have been lower-profile, for now.

According to ICE’s website, as of fall 2024, there are at least 22 Special Response Teams for Homeland Security Investigations around the US (up from 18 in 2021 and five in 2005). Each SRT has 16 to 18 “operators” who all went through a three-week training course at Fort Benning in Georgia similar to the one that Tru Kinetics ran. After completing an intensive three-day selection course involving “pushups, sprints, burpees, pullups, obstacles, weighted sprints and dummy drags followed by intense marksmanship training,” SRT operator candidates are required to pass a 40-hour training course at Fort Benning, which is home to the Army’s training centers for Infantry, Armor, Airborne, and Ranger units.

“They’re not using these teams in a professional way where a situation is underway that requires these teams,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies who researches police militarization. “Army personnel carriers, Navy SEAL tactics, SEALs, hostage rescue tactics, special-forces-grade weapons—why do you need all that for civil immigration violations?”

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Key Takeaways

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings
The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED
Based in Gilbert, Arizona, Tru Kinetics offers training on small-team tactics, hostage rescues, close-quarters combat, building searches, night-vision firearms proficiency, pistol and rifle courses, “vehicle interdiction,” breaching with explosives, and sniper tactics, according to the company’s website
Tru Kinetics received $27,748 for a year-long contract to run a mandatory 40-hour training course that certain members of Department of Homeland Security Special Response Teams receive annually at Fort Benning in Georgia, according to government procurement records reviewed by WIRED