Bakersfield, California
September 19, 2013
Agencies: Bakersfield Police Department California | Kern County Sheriff's Office California
Cause of death: Shooting
Last updated: almost 6 years ago
Jorge Joel Ramirez was walking a tightrope.
It was mid-September 2013 and the 34-year-old man had just offered to help Bakersfield police find and arrest a dangerous, wanted felon by the name of Justin Harger.
What the father of five may not have known was that he would be working without a net.
This story, pieced together from official investigative reports obtained through the California Public Records Act, is a narrative of the last 10 hours of Ramirez’s life — a life that would end in a pool of blood on the asphalt parking lot of a hotel complex on California Avenue, his wrists cuffed behind his back, his lifeless face flat against the pavement.
Harger would die from multiple gunshot wounds as well. And a bullet believed to be from Harger’s Heckler & Koch 9 mm handgun would graze the head of Officer Daniel Brewer, who was treated at a hospital and released.