On The Finest Podcast, we cover the people, art, and movements redefining culture in San Diego, from Blink-182 to scrappy local bands. We also have Colts, a lost composer, a world record traveler, and champion birders. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains discussion of suicide and domestic abuse. We discuss opinions expressed by others. We at KPBS don't endorse those opinions. No one has been charged with a crime relating to Sierra Estrada's death. And we don't intend to imply that anyone should be charged or engaged in wrongdoing. Throughout this podcast, you'll hear my KPBS colleagues voice written documents related to this case, including witness statement excerpts and text messages. Julie and Brandi Estrada voiced their own written quotes. Yeah, number 48. That unit there at the balcony with the hammock. Oh, you weren't kidding. The overpass is right there. Yeah. That's loud. And the trolley runs right through here. I met up with Sierra's mom, Julie, dad, Larry, and little sister, Cheyenne, at what used to be Sierra's apartment. Julie is wearing a neon pink t-shirt with Sierra's face on it. The Mission Valley apartment is in the far back corner of the complex, right where the 8 freeway crisscrosses the trolley tracks. When I first came here and my God, when I heard that thing go by, I just got the most demonic chill in my bones. It was just like a scream and I'm like, God, what the hell? this apartment, there's something about it. I mean, you know, I can't believe they've rented it out to someone. I always wonder if, well, they say people that pass away always go back to the place that they died in. Julie and Cheyenne see signs of Sierra's presence everywhere. The cat sitting in her old apartment's window. the butterfly that flits past us. Larry says no one lived in the unit beneath Sierra, but there was one neighbor across the hall. He told detectives he didn't hear anything the night Sierra died. Maybe over the freeway and the trolley, the gunshot sounded like just another New Year's firework. I'm Katie Heisen, and this is One of Their Own the story of a San Diego police officer's death and the way her department handled it San Diego County is known for being one of America's most expensive regions. Locals are feeling the squeeze and looking for solutions. KPBS's new series, Price of San Diego, delves into the rising cost of groceries, child care, car insurance, and even our beloved California burrito. You won't want to miss this ongoing series live now at kpbs.org slash priceofsandiego. New Year's Day started typically for Sierra's family. Julie shuffled around her house, enjoying the slow pace of the holiday. In the early afternoon, she got a call from her daughter Brandy, asking her if she had heard from Sierra. She hadn't shown up for work after her fight the night before with her boyfriend, Eric Hansen, another San Diego police officer. Julie hadn't heard from Sierra. And suddenly, she was in a panic. She threw on clothes and jumped in Brandy's car to drive to Sierra's apartment. Julie says Brandy was trying to reassure her, saying it's common for couples to fight on New Year's Eve. But Brandy was also driving 85, 90 miles an hour, something Julie had never seen her do. Julie says she kept texting Eric, but he wasn't responding. And she got a bad feeling, mother's intuition. Still today, she hates passing that part of the highway where she knew something was wrong. When they pulled up to the apartment, They found it swarming with cops. We couldn't really get in. All this was just blocked off with cops. There were cop cars everywhere. Brandy drove up, flew out of that car, and literally fell down. I'm walking up. My daughter's literally screaming to the entire police department out there, where the fuck is Eric is Brandy's word. She goes, they were holding her back. And she's like, where the fuck is Eric? Where is he? And I was walking up to Melanie. I said, what happened, Melanie? Melanie Bognuda, Sierra squadmate who found her in her evening gown on her bathroom floor with a bullet wound between her eyes. And she's looking right at me. She's like, she shot herself. And that was it. She shot herself. Larry and Cheyenne drove down to join them. While the family waited, an officer carried out Trevor. He was found locked in his crate. This still bothers Sierra's family. Poor dog had been in that crate. theoretically from like 7 p.m. on New Year's Eve till 4 p.m., 3.30 p.m., whatever the next day. They say Sierra would have taken Trevor out to use the bathroom as soon as she came home. That's the part that makes no sense, was that, you know, if she was home, home, settled in for the night, she would have already walked him. And then would she have walked him in a long dress? That part didn't make any sense because more than likely it was probably dragging. Larry says the dog in the crate and Sierra still in her dress could mean she died soon after getting home. The family stood behind the police tape in the parking lot. Hour after hour passed. The sun went down. We were out here freezing. It was so cold. It was miserable. We were out here. And there was nowhere to walk. It's like they had already cleaned it up, case shut by the time me and my dad got here. Yeah, then a lot of them were. Sierra's family says from the beginning, SDPD officers called it a suicide. That night, I was walking with one of the cops, and I'm like, well, you know, what about an autopsy? And he's like, no, this is not a homicide. This isn't a homicide. This is a suicide. You can't get an autopsy. I did ask the detective. I said, was there a note? And he said, no, there was no note that we found. The almost immediate conclusion that Sierra killed herself shaped everything that followed. I spoke with a death investigations consultant, Paul Parker. Paul used to be the chief deputy director of Los Angeles County's Medical Examiner Department. He's investigated thousands of deaths. Now, as a consultant, he offers an outside pair of eyes on death investigations. I shared Sierra's case files with Paul. You're supposed to start at a homicide. Everything is a homicide until you prove otherwise. every death, even if someone wakes up in the morning and finds their loved one who had presumably died in the middle of the night when law enforcement gets there whenever this death happens it should be looked at as a homicide until you can work your way past that just from what you hearing and seeing But the limited documentation I seen tends to indicate that we were looking at this as a suicide from moment one and moving forward. That's what I noticed. SDPD Captain Judd Campbell was a homicide lieutenant for several years. He reviewed Sierra's case in 2022. He did not talk with me directly, but provided recorded audio statements through an SDPD spokesperson for this story. He stands by the investigation's thoroughness. If someone tried to hurt our police officer or did hurt one of our police officers, we want to know it. We want to catch him and we want to hold him accountable. That's not what happened here. And I feel very confident about that because of the resources that we deployed, because of the methodical and professional investigation. An entire homicide team is deployed to that location. That's a sergeant, that's four detectives, that's a crime scene specialist to process, that's a homicide lieutenant to manage the overall flow. My job, as I saw it reviewing this case, is it's not to convince Sierra's relatives that this was a suicide. It was to make an independent professional assessment. I did, and I do stand by that this was a suicide. But I'm very sympathetic to them struggling to understand that. Records show the homicide team was sent to Sierra's apartment to, quote, conduct a suicide investigation. The homicide team never looked for fingerprints. The box on the investigation form where the detective is supposed to explain why they didn't try to find fingerprints was left blank. Paul says that's more confirmation the death was handled as a suicide from the start. Detectives interviewed Sierra's family members, some right at the scene. The family was told then and there that Sierra had killed herself. So their answers to detectives revolved around that belief. They just said she was shot. She shot herself. That's all they said. She shot herself. They say knowing what they know now, they may have shared more or different information with detectives. Larry says he had a brief exchange with the medical examiner on scene. He asked her what Sierra was wearing and where she was found. The third question was, you know, where was she shot and how bad was it? Just because in the back of my mind, I was like, you know, how are the kids ever going to see her again if her head was in a terrible condition? And she just said, no, no, the mortuary can fix her up. for viewing. I think she pointed to her head but she didn't really say where but she said she kind of said no they could fix it kind of thing. They didn't see Sierra's body that day. When we saw her body coming down and the gurney in a bag they wouldn't let us open the bag and they were um I think they took her up here and then they told us we had to say our goodbyes like right here or something. That night, the same night, they said, okay, you do know you're responsible for the crime scene. You have to contract somebody to clean it up. So the county coroner gives you a pamphlet. And inside the pamphlet is cleaning services. It could clean up, quote, crime scenes, blood, you know, human matter. And I'm sitting there opening this pamphlet like, what? And like, yeah, it's the family's responsibility to basically clean up the apartment. A couple days later, the family returned to Sierra's apartment. We rendezvoused with two detectives. They said, stay down here. We need to go upstairs and just, you know, clear the room, make sure whatever they told us. They went up there together, and then they came out with a trash bag and then walked right over to the dumpster, which is right behind there, and told us what was in the bag and threw it away. He says, oh, we just didn't want you to have to see this, so I just want you to know that we bagged up her bathroom rug. There was some blood stains on it, so we just bagged it up and threw it on the dumpster in the apartment. When her family went up, they found the bathroom spotless. We just expected the worst when we went to that bathroom, but to see the bathroom just that pristine. The only trace left was the bullet hole in the bathroom wall. Paul says it's unusual for police to clean up the scene. Yeah, that doesn't seem to make sense to me. I've never known the police to clean a scene up. If anyone's ever tidied a scene up or got rid of things, it's the medical examiner people who've done that. We've done that for families kind of all the time. Like, hey, that way you don't have to go in and look at the soiled pillow or bedding or carpeting if we can get rid of it. We would. I can't speak to why the police would do that. But he says he wouldn't expect police to preserve the bath mat if they didn't think it's a homicide. But whatever is blood-soiled, unless I really thought it was a homicide, then I would have maintained it for trace evidence of hairs and whatever. But in a case like this, on the surface of what I'm seeing, and with the diagrams and the reports, I would not have brought on a bath man. Her family rides this loop of reasoning around and around. You think it's a suicide, so you throw out the bathmat. And you never find evidence of a homicide, so it was right all along to throw out the bathmat. Because she was a fellow cop, they didn't want the family to deal with it. That's how we took it on the third, was they were trying to do something nice. But in retrospect... They're destroying evidence! They asked for Sierra's red dress back, and that was spotless too. There was no residue blood. It looked like the dress had just come off the rack. There was blood in the living room. The one detective says, oh yeah, you're going to see a blood heel print in the middle of the living room. I said, what? The detective told him that when they carried Sierra's body out, someone accidentally stepped off the protective sheeting and onto the carpet. it. There must have been enough blood for officers to step in it and track it out. But no blood on her dress. Right. Or anywhere else in the bathroom that we could see because it had all been cleaned up. So then the heel print in the living room becomes now part of another conspiracy. We're like, no, that's a cover up. More coming up. We'll see you next time. pbs.org slash podcasts or wherever you listen. Sierra's family has gone back and forth about what happened. At a minimum, they think the department handled the investigation sloppily, in part because the people investigating were co-workers of both Sierra and Eric. You don't take care of your own. You don't handle cases of a police officer. There's too much conflict of interest here. About a dozen SDPD and medical examiner employees involved with this case declined to speak with me or didn't respond to repeated requests to talk. Sierra's parents say even the lead investigator, Luke Johnson, knew Sierra. SDPD didn't respond to questions about that. I do have a group photo with Luke and Sierra at a Christmas party together Luke also declined to talk with me Maybe SDPD could offer context or answers that would clear some of these concerns up Legally, they could. It's a closed case. Captain Judd Campbell says they've been totally transparent with the Estradas. Department homicide members have spoken with them at length and have been there to help them understand and to know the details about what happened to Ciara. We've been there, and we will still be there. We will support them as they try to continue to try to process this. So we have been completely transparent and communicative with the Estrada family. And like I said, they lost their daughter, but we lost an officer. We are very understanding of what they're going for growing through. Sarah's family believe her co-workers who investigated already had ideas about who she was and her relationship with Eric, that they saw her as naive, overly emotional. Her sergeant, Farrell, told detectives in his witness statement, quote, My impression with Sierra and her relationship with Eric was that it was like a high school relationship. It was obvious to me she was immature and inexperienced when it came to relationship issues. Julie thinks this view of Sierra is unfair. It ignores who she was as a grown woman, all she accomplished and endured as a female police officer, the stability she had created for herself, and the role Eric played in unraveling it. Don't tell me that Ciara is your damn teenage daughter that was just lovestruck over a boyfriend situation and she killed herself because she was crying over Eric. Don't compare me that girls and relationships, you don't know. Don't tell me, don't compare Ciara to your damn teenage daughter. These conflicts of interest make it feel impossible for the family to accept the investigation's conclusions today. They think SDPD should have immediately called in an outside organization, like the sheriff's office, to investigate. Paul, the investigations consultant, says it's not uncommon for police departments to investigate cases involving their own. But maybe that should change. Do I think that that is something that a recommendation could be made? When you have a violent death such as this of an active police officer, perhaps you bring someone else in to do it, just like they do with their officer-involved shootings, the county-wide protocol that they have. that would be a great recommendation. That way it stays clean. He does see ways the co-worker relationship may have influenced the investigation, like the moving of the gun. If she was obviously dead, should the gun have been moved? If she was obviously dead, no. Absolutely, she should never have been touched. It should have been left in place for the medical examiner. Nothing, if she was obviously dead. And I believe she was. But I, you know, this is a friend of hers, and it's a police officer who's trained to make a gun, you know, get the gun away. Paul says even when law enforcement moves a gun, medical examiners should ask to see and inspect it. But the medical examiner's report for Sierra's case notes the gun was taken away by SDPD before she even arrived. The investigators weren't just co-workers with Sierra. They were co-workers with Eric, too. Sierra's sergeant, Farrell Layton, said Eric was highly emotional after hearing about Sierra's death over the police radio. Remember that Farrell said before they entered Sierra's apartment, Eric told him he last spoke to Sierra at 12.30 p.m. just a couple hours prior. Farrell told detectives he walked back to Eric to confirm the 12.30 p.m. time, but quote, He had heard me put out on the radio, Sierra was deceased, and he was hysterical. He was so distraught there was no way I was going to be able to talk to him. Eric did give a witness statement just hours later. In it, he says, This is unbelievable. It was a stupid argument. Throughout, he critiques and complains about Sierra, calling her fragile, insecure, dramatic, crazy. saying he was fed up with arguing with her in public. We don't have every word of what he said, or the audio recording of him saying it. We don't know his tone of voice. SDPD won't give the recording to Sierra's family. We only have the detective's three-page summary of a half-hour interview. Sierra's family say Eric attended the funeral with his parents and a grief counselor. It was at the family viewing, the day before the funeral, that Larry noticed something unexpected. I mean, I kissed her forehead. There was nothing irregular about her forehead. It looks like a dark spot. It's just like a birthmark. Julie shows me a photo of Sierra in her casket. There's a raised, dark spot where the funeral home covered the wound with makeup putty, but it's not where they thought it would be. It's like really the bridge of the nose below the eyes. I told them. That location, not the temple or mouth or forehead, but between the eyes, set off alarm bells. It seemed like an improbable location for Sierra to have shot herself. That's another red flag. That I should not stop investigating. I says, look, something's never been right here. Something doesn't settle right. Cheyenne noticed something unexpected at the funeral home, too. On the display shelves, where grieving family members can pick out urns to purchase, was a model urn engraved with the name Eric Hansen. A bizarre coincidence that she and Julie took as a sign from the universe. The family began to question what they'd been told. Maybe Sierra hadn't killed herself. They held on to these questions even after SDPD officially closed the case. Then, almost a year after Sierra died, Julie went to the medical examiner directly and discovered there had been an autopsy after all. Eleven months later, I finally get an autopsy. Because they told me and lied and said that we were not entitled to an autopsy. The autopsy surprised them. It began with an opinion section on why the doctor listed the cause of death as suicide. Less than a page long. Most of it reiterates the medical examiner's report. It includes what STPD had already determined, that they found her, quote, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound of the head. And it includes what Eric told detectives about phone conversations with Sierra. Which is kind of weird. I didn't expect that. I expected the autopsy to be more medical. Like, this is what we found on the body. and cause of death, gunshot wound to the forehead. But because it has the police's summation, it says cause of death is suicide. Neither the autopsy nor the medical examiner's report mentions that Eric was a police officer. Sierra's parents say the autopsy doctor was surprised when they told her he was. She did not respond to requests to talk with me. Paul thinks that information should have been communicated to the medical examiner and autopsy doctor. That would be good for them to know. Not that it would change anything. It wouldn necessarily change anything but it would inform decisions as to if this person is a police officer then he might know how to do things differently than a normal person would do as far as a scene or to cover tracks or whatever the case might be and be more familiar with guns or whatever. The bullet hole is low in the wall, just a couple of feet off the ground and inches from the sink. The autopsy says the bullet wound was a half inch right of Sierra's midline, closer to her right eye. The bullet traveled down and to her right and exited behind her right eye area. Based on the markings around the wound, the gun wasn't pressed against her skin, but anywhere from a few inches to a foot away. When the family talks about this, they do something I have done at least a hundred times since Julie first called me. They hold up their right arm, because Sierra was right-handed. They form a finger gun, hold it a few inches away from their face, and try to contort it around to point just to their right of the bridge of their nose. It's almost impossibly awkward. But Sierra's gun didn't have a grip safety, which means she could have held it up with both hands and pulled the trigger with her thumb. Is it possible? Yes. Is it probable? No. Is it likely? No. But is it possible? Sure, it's possible. It's not just the mechanics of the shot that seem unlikely to the family, but the choice of that location for a suicide. Statistically, it is almost negligible, and that's the problem of statistics. What I was trying to tell Julie is that there's no national database that's 100% foolproof. There is a database of homicide or suicide by handguns. One 2012 study looked at nearly 500 autopsies of people found to have killed themselves with a single gunshot to the head. Only 7% shot themselves in the forehead. And a 2009 study found women were half as likely as men to shoot themselves in the head. It may be less common, but Paul says it does happen. We were always taught when I was a death investigator that, and it was just stereotypical, right? Well, females don't shoot themselves, and they certainly don't shoot themselves in the head. If they shoot themselves, they would shoot themselves somewhere down low so they don't disfigure themselves. At least that was the mentality, you know, 30 years ago when I got into this line of work. I've had innumerable female gunshot wound suicides of the head. So it's not unusual. Larry also doesn't think they have enough information for the angle of the bullet to be solid evidence of anything. It doesn't necessarily mean anything because you don't necessarily know the position of the head at the time the shot was occurred. or the angle of a gun. Is the gun pointed up? Is the gun pointed down? Is the head tilted down? Is the head tilted up at the time of the shot? They only just give you the fact. Here's the entry wound, here's the exit wound. It's not like, you know, who killed JFK, you know, from the angled trajectory, you see that kind of stuff on TV. If Sierra held the gun with two hands, it could explain why the bullet casing was found still lodged inside the gun. That can happen if something is blocking the slide, and why there was gun soot on fingers on both hands. But all that could also happen if two people were grappling with a gun. Like almost every detail in this story, it can be looked at from two angles, tipped one way or the other, and tilt the whole thing to two very different conclusions. Paul, the consultant, doesn't think grappling is as likely because he doesn't see any other signs of struggle. In the autopsy report, I wanted to see if there was any kind of damage to her hands and her fingernails and to see if there was any kind of struggle going on. And I didn't see that. As a matter of fact, I saw the opposite. The fingernails are painted dark red, cut short and clean, and do not extend beyond the fingertips. What about the bruises on her feet? The autopsy describes blue contusions, a sizable bruise near her knee, and three more on her feet. Those alarmed Julie. Paul wasn't as concerned. I don't know what that came from. I don't know the aging of those things. I don't know what, if that means anything. I would be more concerned with bruising to her arms, any clothing that may be ripped, hair that is, you know, things along those lines, anything displaced in or about the room. The cause of death on the autopsy is listed as suicide. But Sears' parents say when they picked up the autopsy, the doctor told them something that only fueled their concerns. She said she couldn't rule out homicide. Paul says autopsy doctors don't have to be absolutely certain to write down a cause of death. It's common for there to be some uncertainty. The cause of death listed is whatever seems more likely to them, even by the tiniest margin. So the 50.0001. In other words, just enough evidence to tilt it one way or the other in the doctor's eyes. At the time she signed this report on January 18, 2018, 16 days after she did the autopsy, she believed there was a preponderance for suicide. Can she change that? Of course. She can amend the death certificate to change the manner if she believes that new and additional information has come to light, that leads her now to think, well, now there's not a preponderance one way or the other, so I'm going to go undetermined. The autopsy wasn't the only record that Sierra's family struggled to obtain. They say they were initially told they couldn't get anything. They only learned months later they had rights to her case file. It was kind of like pulling teeth. It wasn't like they were forthcoming with all the information other than self-inflated gunshot. Yeah, 25 questions. Self-inflated gunshot. Okay, no, I want to know more about that night. I still have so many questions, I don't even know what to ask, you know, kind of thing. And so we kind of off the cuff said, well, you know, why can't I just get the whole investigation? Oh, no, no, you can't have anything. They tell us, well, it would just be redacted. The whole thing would be redacted. The families fight for records and justice and a new law that might have changed it all. Next time on One of Their Own. If you or someone you know have thoughts of suicide or need emotional support, please call or text 980. If you or someone you know are experiencing domestic abuse, please call 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. Help is available 24-7. One of Their Own is produced by me, Katie Heisen, and edited by David Washburn with support from Elizabeth Haynes. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Additional voicing for this episode by Scott Rod and Andrew Dyer. have different views, so you may talk, not about politics, but to understand each other better. Sign up at kpbs.org slash onesmallstep.
