The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who allegedly fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine on Monday was prone to violence and held racist beliefs, according to some of the people who were close to him.
Ashley Brouillette told NPR her ex-husband, David Brouillette, was the officer who fatally shot Joan Durán Guerrero four times during an attempted traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday. She said she found out he was the officer responsible when he called her on Wednesday, asking her to vouch for his character.
"He asked me to basically talk good in his character, not to talk bad about him. And if I couldn't not talk bad about him, then just not to talk at all to anybody," she told NPR. "And I told him that I was not going to lie for him. He asked me not to talk about the abuse in our marriage. And I told him again I was not going to lie for him."
David Brouillette did not respond to messages from NPR seeking comment. An ICE spokesperson said the agency will not confirm or deny whether Brouillette was the ICE officer responsible for Durán Guerrero's death. ICE spokesperson Lauren Bis did say in an email that the ICE officer in question has "nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training."
Scott Collins told NPR that he was best friends with David Brouillette in high school in Maine. Collins testified on behalf of Ashley Brouillette in the divorce proceedings. David's attorneys said that Collins and David "were once friends, but their relationship ended because Mr. Collins was jealous of Mr. Brouillette's successful career."
"He had a bad tendency of going out and looking for fights," Collins said. "If he saw something online that he didn't like, that somebody said that he knew, he would go out and start that fight."
Collins also said that David Brouillette used anti-Black racial slurs in high school. Ashley Brouillette says she worries racism may have played a part in Durán Guerrero's death.
"He has displayed racism. His nickname in high school was 'White Boy David,' if that tells you anything," she said.
Ashley Brouillette said she has known David Brouillette since they were preteens. She said there were many moments of violence in their marriage that lasted from 2007 to 2009.
"There was an incident where we had been fighting, and I walked away and I got in the shower, and he comes in with a gun and pointed at me and tells me that he's going to blow my brains all over the bathtub," she told NPR.
There are no police reports to corroborate the story. She said she recanted her story, something she said she did on other occasions after complaining to authorities about her ex husband's behavior.
"Even though he did all these horrible things to me, in a way, he was still like my security blanket because he's all I ever known. And so I would recant my story and say he didn't do anything. And so then the police wouldn't arrest him for it," she said. "David always intimidated me. It's part of the reason why I stayed silent all these years about things that I've gone through."
She did, however, keep a profanity-laced voicemail message from November, when she had filed a restraining order against her ex-husband. In the voicemail, which NPR obtained, he slurs his speech and ends by saying that she and the women in her family should have their throats cut.
"Am I threatening that I'm gonna do that? No, no. But do I think that you should have your f****** throat cuts? Or should have had them cut. Yep," the voicemail says.
When their marriage had collapsed and they were in the middle of a contentious divorce in 2009, she says she reached out to Brouillette's platoon leader in the Maine Army National Guard. She offered to fax over paperwork showing that he had been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia but they dismissed it as ravings of a "petty ex-wife," she says.
An NPR phone call and message to the Maine National Guard were not immediately returned.
Then, at the end of last year, when Brouillette first told Ashley he'd been hired by ICE, she didn't know what to make of it.
"I honestly thought that he was being delusional and I didn't believe it," she said.
Ashley Brouillette is unsure if there was a background check. If there had been, they might have seen a trail of violence. Like the time, in 2022, when Ashley says child protective services and the police were both called to his home after he threw his then-13 year-old daughter through a glass coffee table.
In a 2021 court filing, David Brouillette was stripped of his firearms temporarily. In the filing, his second ex-wife, Lucinda Brouillette, accused him of becoming more aggressive with their then 13-year-old daughter.
"He asked her if she thought he was verbally abusive and she told him yes and he grabbed her feet and dragged her out of bed, laughed and asked if he thought she was physically abusive now," Lucinda Brouillette wrote in the document.
Ashley Brouillette said she is distraught over this week's events, and that someone has lost their life.
"I feel like even though I tried to bring awareness to his mental health conditions before and I got ignored, that I really need to push and be heard now and hopefully prevent something like this from happening again," she said.
Copyright 2026 NPR
