1 year after the deadly Dallas ICE office shooting questions remain unanswered
One year after a deadly sniper attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas, there are still a lot of questions that continue to go unanswered.
Among those asking them is the spouse of one of the two detainees killed during the predawn attack.
A shrine to Norlan Fuentes has a prominent place in the Dallas home he shared with Berenice Prieto and her four children for 5 years. She still struggles to come to grips with the fact that Thursday will mark one year since the 37-year-old was shot and killed in a terror attack outside the Dallas ICE office off of Stemmons Freeway.
"He was not a delinquent like people paint him out to be," Prieto said. "You have a lot of people who think that just because he was in ICE custody, that he was a criminal, but he was a hard-working individual."
Prieto says she still wants to see her spouse's autopsy report, but federal authorities are ignoring her.
"It's been very unjust. It's very cruel. It's been over a year, and so far, they have never responded to me, and I need to know what happened to Norlan," said Prieto.
What happened to Fuentes and another ICE detainee who died has yet to be explained in any thorough investigative report.
"There should be a public, you know, report, so that they can explain the deficiencies within their security system," said immigration advocate Carlos Quintanilla.
Unmarked, blacked-out vehicles continue to come and go into the same parking area where the shooting happened.
Across the street, there's an opening in an iron gate that surrounds the law office where the sniper, who later committed suicide, fired from an elevated position overlooking the facility into a transport van carrying immigration detainees.
Crime and security experts say detainees and ICE employees both deserve to be better protected from future attacks.
"You want to have these facilities not surrounded by tall buildings," said Alex Del Carmen, the Dallas Police Department's criminologist in residence. "You want to make sure that there is very clear visibility for those individuals that are protecting the facility, so all of these factors, to seem to me, that they were taken into consideration when they designated this facility to be an ICE facility."
Almost all of the information about what happened came out within two days of the attack.
None of CBS News Texas' messages to the ICE media office have been returned. Questions about any security upgrades or investigative findings continue to go unanswered.
While the family of Norlan Fuentes wants the facility closed, activity continues around it daily. Reminders of the deadly attack are only found in the homes of those who died.
