Prosecutor Frees 25-Year-Old Prosser Man Held on Murder Hold After Half-Brother Punched Him and Threw a Rock That Shattered His Red Dot Sight

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PROSSER, WA — A 25-year-old man booked on suspicion of second-degree murder after shooting his half-brother in the family driveway has been released after the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office concluded the evidence indicates he likely acted in self-defense.

According to the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded shortly after 6 p.m. on October 12 to a reported shooting in the 24000 block of N. Rothrock Road. The 911 caller reported that his brother had been shot in a suspected drive-by and was unresponsive with an abdominal wound. Detectives determined there was no drive-by. The shooting came out of a domestic altercation between Jose Cruz Escobar, 25, and Alejandro Salazar, 27. Salazar died at the scene despite lifesaving efforts, and Cruz Escobar was arrested without incident and booked into Benton County Corrections.

The prosecutor’s office, which sent three members to the scene that night, laid out what investigators found after a search warrant for the residence, a full documentation of the physical scene, and interviews with everyone involved.

Salazar had been treated at a nearby hospital earlier that day for a mental health crisis. He became aggressive during that hospitalization and was given a sedative. He was released and got home about two hours before the shooting. His sister, who lived at the residence, was already afraid of him because of something that happened the night before. He told the family he was looking for a butane tank he could not find.

Cruz Escobar had a job interview in Richland that evening. His mother was going to drive him, and his sister was going along because she did not want to be alone in the house with Salazar. Before they left, Salazar walked up to the car with a rock in his hand, demanded to be let in, and threatened to smash the window where his sister was sitting. Then he went back inside.

By that point the entire household was arranging itself around one man’s aggression. The sister would not stay home. The mother was the ride. The rock was already in his hand.

Cruz Escobar was in the kitchen making tea and getting ready to leave. The two argued about the butane tank. Salazar punched him in the face. He pressed him against a kitchen cupboard. Cruz Escobar got away. He retreated to his bedroom. He came back with a firearm.

When he returned to the kitchen, Salazar threw the rock at him. It struck the red dot sight mounted on the gun. Investigators later found the firearm with the broken sight, along with glass and plastic shards, inside the house. The prosecutor’s office said that physical evidence corroborated Cruz Escobar’s account.

The two men left the house through separate doors. Their sister was still sitting in the family vehicle when both reappeared in the driveway. Cruz Escobar was near the car. According to his account, Salazar came at him aggressively. Cruz Escobar says he fired several warning shots into the ground. Salazar kept coming. Cruz Escobar fired again, a shot he says he aimed at Salazar’s lower extremity. It struck him in the abdomen. Cruz Escobar immediately tried to render aid and called 911. The sheriff’s initial release described wounds to Salazar’s arm and abdomen; the prosecutor’s account describes one round striking him after the warning shots.

He went to jail anyway.

Look at what deputies had in front of them that night. A caller reporting a drive-by that did not happen. A dead man in a driveway. Multiple shell casings strung along that driveway from the victim’s location back toward the house. The prosecutor’s office says Cruz Escobar made the 911 call himself; the sheriff’s release does not name the caller, only what the caller said. Whatever was said in those first minutes, investigators had to work backward from a false picture to the real one, and every hour of that work was time Cruz Escobar spent as a murder suspect instead of a victim.

Those warning shots are the detail I want every reader to take home. A warning shot is a round you are accountable for, fired at nothing. If the threat justifies a shot, the shot goes at the threat. If it does not, the gun stays down and you keep making distance. The same goes for aiming at a leg. The prosecutor’s account has him trying for the lower extremity and hitting the abdomen, and that is what happens when you try to shoot to wound under stress, with a shattered sight, at a man closing on you. A gun is not a tool for injuring someone a little. It stops a threat or it stays holstered.

Deadly force is justified only against an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm. What prosecutors describe is a man who had been punched in the face and pinned against a cupboard, who retreated, who had a rock thrown at him hard enough to shatter an optic, and who was then approached again by the same man in a driveway while his sister sat in the car a few feet away. The prosecutor’s office stops short of a formal finding. It says the evidence indicates Cruz Escobar “likely acted in self-defense,” that there is insufficient evidence to keep him detained, and nothing more.

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Cruz Escobar was held on a felony investigation hold, not a filed charge, and the prosecutor’s office has not announced a final charging decision. The sheriff’s office described the case as an active and ongoing investigation.

Salazar was 27. Cruz Escobar was 25. About two hours after a hospital sent one brother home, the other was kneeling over him in the driveway, on the phone with 911.

Read the original story: Prosecutor Frees 25-Year-Old Prosser Man Held on Murder Hold After Half-Brother Punched Him and Threw a Rock That Shattered His Red Dot Sight