Nearly a decade before Gabriel Garcia and a Lakewood police officer died in a shootout with each other Thursday, Garcia attacked an Adams County sheriff’s deputy in the middle of the night.

The deputy stopped Garcia and his girlfriend in a neighborhood near Westminster as he investigated a trespassing call in August 2017. Garcia, who had outstanding warrants for his arrest, ran from the deputy, who gave chase. When the deputy caught up, Garcia fought him. Garcia punched the deputy in the face, bit his arm, pushed a knee into his back, strangled the deputy and grabbed for the deputy’s holstered gun, according to an affidavit that detailed the fight.

One of those actions stands out to experts now, years later, in the wake of Thursday’s shootout in which Agent Nicholas Graham and Garcia were killed, three other Lakewood officers were shot and a bystander was wounded: the strangulation, when Garcia squeezed the deputy’s neck and cut off his ability to breathe.

The act of strangulation is a red flag, a mark of dangerousness that is often overlooked by the criminal justice system but which shows up in the histories of a significant share of the people who later go on to kill police officers, experts told The Denver Post. They argue that law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges should consider past strangulation incidents as a major risk factor, including it in the calculus for gauging a suspect’s threat when attempting to make an arrest and during bond and sentencing deliberations.

“We are always told, as police officers, that domestic violence calls are the most dangerous and that really isn’t true,” said Bill Smock, a police surgeon for the Jeffersontown Police Department in Kentucky and an expert on strangulation. “It is the suspect that is the most dangerous. And you can encounter a strangler on a shoplifting call, on a traffic stop, on an eviction notice.”

Garcia strangled not only the Adams County Sheriff’s deputy but also his girlfriend, the woman told investigators after his 2017 arrest. She said that he used methamphetamine on the night he fought the deputy and “his behavior changes” when he uses meth, according to the affidavit.

Strangulation is most often seen within domestic violence situations, and a large number of police officer killings involve men with a history of domestic violence, said Gerry Fineman, a former California prosecutor now living in Colorado Springs. He chairs a committee for the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, part of a nonprofit focused on combating domestic violence.

Fineman reviewed 10 police officer killings in Riverside County, California — where he was a prosecutor — between 1993 and 2013 and found half of the suspects previously faced accusations of strangling someone. In a separate Idaho police department’s review of 10 non-fatal police shootings, 30% of suspects had histories of strangulation and 80% had a history of domestic violence. A broader review of 44 police killings found 75% of suspects had a history of domestic violence, according to a 2022 report in Police Chief Magazine.

“You have individuals who are willing to hold someone’s life in their hands, literally,” Fineman said. “And they’re just as willing to take the life of anyone else. That is why we say stranglers are the most dangerous men on the planet.”

Denver this year rolled out a citywide approach to strangulation in domestic violence situations that is meant to ensure the city’s first responders understand how dangerous strangulation is for domestic violence victims. Women who are strangled are 7.5 times more likely to be killed by their partners than victims of domestic violence who were not strangled.

Fineman and Smock argue that states should better track strangulation so officers can receive a warning when pulling someone over or running someone’s name to check for warrants.

“If we could inform law enforcement officers somehow that when they are pulling a vehicle over that person has a strangulation history, that might change their tactical approach or give them reason for enhanced safety in their stop,” Fineman said.

‘Fatal funnel’

It’s not clear what Graham and the other Lakewood police officers knew about Garcia when they confronted him around 6:30 p.m. Thursday, after he boarded a bus at the intersection of West Colfax Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard.

The officers recognized Garcia as matching the description of a suspect in a hit-and-run crash earlier in the day, but police spokesman John Romero did not answer questions Monday about whether the officers knew Garcia’s name or his violent past.

The officers swarmed Garcia as he boarded a Regional Transportation District bus, police and witnesses said. Following Garcia onto the bus put the officers in a precarious situation with no safe places to hide from gunfire, said James Allbee, a former police officer and use of force expert.

“You are basically walking into a fatal funnel,” he said. “Meaning that you are moving into a tight space where you’ve got little room to move, cover and concealment is very, very challenging, and we’ve got the general public that is also present on the bus.”

That tight environment also raises concerns about friendly fire, Allbee said. He noted that the underlying hit-and-run crash isn’t the type of incident that would automatically raise officers’ guards — not like a crime involving a gun or an assault might — and that the Lakewood officers might not have known Garcia was armed. If they’d suspected higher danger, the officers could have followed the bus and waited for Garcia to disembark or entered the bus with shields and better protection, he said.

“It’s a matter of knowing what you know when you know it,” Allbee said.

Garcia, who has a lengthy criminal history in Colorado, had been out of prison for just a few weeks when the officers spotted him Thursday.

He had pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer in the 2017 attack on the sheriff’s deputy and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2019. Prosecutors dropped an attempted murder charge and related counts as part of a plea agreement, court records show.

The Colorado Department of Corrections did not provide records on Monday that would detail exactly when Garcia was released from prison on that 10-year sentence, but he had been freed by July 2025, when he was arrested for forgery, court records show. Garcia was arrested again in October 2025, for trespassing, and in April was sentenced to a year in prison, with credit for about five months he had already spent behind bars while the case was pending.

He served another five months of that year-long sentence before he was released on parole on Sept. 23, a date that Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia said reflected reductions in his sentence for “earned time,” which is typically awarded for good behavior.

Garcia almost immediately got into trouble.

On Sept. 28, Garcia was a passenger in a truck that was involved in a hit-and-run crash in Broomfield, according to the Broomfield Police Department. When officers located and stopped the truck, they found that Garcia was wanted on a parole warrant. He was arrested on the parole warrant and cited for initially giving officers a false name, spokeswoman Rachel Haslett said in a news release Monday.

The department held Garcia in custody at the Broomfield Detention Center until Oct. 20, when the Division of Adult Parole ordered that he be released. Garcia was released “into the care of his family,” Haslett said, and was supposed to report to the Westminster Parole Office the next day.

It is not clear whether he made that parole appointment. Gonzalez-Garcia acknowledged Garcia was under parole supervision when he got into the gunfight on Thursday.

“We take this matter extremely seriously and are conducting a thorough internal review of Garcia’s supervision,” she said in a statement Friday.

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