Death on an Arkansas highway: what happened to Daniel Barajas?

Daniel Barajas awoke a few minutes after 4.30am to a spotlight shining through the foggy window of his SUV on a central Arkansas highway. Two sheriff’s deputies stood outside.

Related: ‘A talented, goofy kid’: family of Ryan Gainer, autistic teen killed by police, speak out

He had stopped to sleep after a long day spent driving. A few more hours in the darkness of Interstate 30 and Barajas would arrive in Texas and meet his infant niece and nephew for the first time.

But first the 38-year-old had the cops to deal with. The Saline county sheriff’s deputies had stopped Barajas after reportedly seeing his car parked on a highway on-ramp and searched the vehicle for drugs. Their interaction would take nearly an hour and a half and involve six deputies and two EMTs.

Barajas never made it to his destination.

Roughly six minutes after deputies reported clearing the area and leaving him in his vehicle on the side of the dark and rainy highway with an order not to drive, Barajas was fatally struck on the interstate.

Barajas’s family was told he walked into oncoming traffic. An officer told his sister that police believed Barajas was a drug trafficker and that he had been hallucinating.

But Barajas was excited to see family and meet his niece and nephew, his sisters, Xexilia Barajas and Raquel Ramos, said. Their brother had no history with drugs – he was a traveling contract welder who had worked on projects for the federal government. The coroner ruled his death a suicide.

The nature of Barajas’s death and the official account of what occurred on 15 January 2022, described in reports that include numerous errors, incomplete documents and contradictory accounts from deputies, has raised serious questions for his loved ones.

On Wednesday, the Barajas family filed a civil rights complaint against the deputies, the sheriff, the Arkansas state police and the coroner, arguing that Barajas was profiled because of his Latino heritage and deputies violated his rights and caused his death.

The family and their attorney, Mike Laux, a national civil rights lawyer who has worked on police misconduct cases in Arkansas for 13 years, hope that the lawsuit will shed light on what exactly occurred on the highway.

“This is destroying us, destroying our family, not knowing,” Xexilia said. “We want the truth.”

•••

Barajas lived in New Mexico with a roommate, though he spent much of his time on the road traveling to job sites across the US, sometimes visiting multiple states a month. His vehicle was stocked with everything he needed for his travels, including specialty contacts and welder’s eye goggles to treat his eye conditions, and his rosary.

He was close with his family – they regularly got together to camp and ski in New Mexico. While he was away working, they would check in over the phone frequently. But he hadn’t seen his sisters Raquel and Xexilia, who had both recently given birth, in months due to the pandemic.

On 14 January 2022, he spent the day driving through Kentucky headed toward Dallas. He told his roommate that he had considered sleeping in a hotel but decided against it, his family said.

“[His roommate] said he was so excited to see us,” Xexilia said. “He said he wanted to hurry up and get on the road to see the family.”

At some point in his journey, he stopped to sleep in the back of his Nissan Xterra off Interstate 30 in Saline county, about 45 miles (72km) outside Little Rock.

According to reports from the Saline county sheriff’s office, deputies reported coming upon Barajas’s vehicle in the middle of an on-ramp at around 4.35am. The deputies quickly made contact with a supervisor, who dispatched a canine officer.

The deputies Sullivan Sulzberger and Hunter Thompson describe Barajas as acting bizarrely, and note that one or both of his eyes were very red. Barajas suffered from multiple eye conditions, including one that caused irritation and redness.

Barajas appeared to be “not completely coherent” and talking to himself, the deputies wrote. Sulzberger states in his report that at one point during the stop he and Thompson had to grab Barajas by the arm after he attempted to walk past them and into traffic – something not mentioned in Thompson’s report.

During their interactions, Barajas told the police that he was fine but that he was having an issue with his contact lens. Still, the deputies contacted medical personnel, stating that Barajas was experiencing hallucinations and had attempted to walk into traffic.

The EMTs who evaluated Barajas said he appeared “altered” but was calm and alert and able to answer questions. More deputies had arrived on scene, including a drug detection dog. Neither the canine nor the deputies who searched his vehicle found any drugs.

The deputies who checked his identity found he did not have a criminal record. He reportedly told deputies that he may have been acting strange because he had not slept much.

Still, Thompson said in his report that he informed Barajas that he could not drive “due to his mental state” but said that he could wait in his vehicle for his girlfriend to come pick him up. The deputies reported leaving the area around 5.51am with a lieutenant telling Barajas that he could walk to a nearby truck stop but that he should not try to cross the interstate. She describes him as walking in the direction of the stop as deputies departed.

At 5.57am, a driver in a Kia was on his way to work when he saw a man suddenly enter the highway, according to the family’s lawsuit. He braked, but struck him, sending him over the hood of his car. The driver quickly pulled over and ran to try to help the man, who was on his hands and knees. The man, Barajas, held his arm out over his face, as if to brace himself, the lawsuit states, and was then hit by multiple semi trucks.

In the aftermath, the driver was told by law enforcement that he shouldn’t feel bad about hitting Barajas because he was a “homeless drug addict” and that he was a suspected drug trafficker, the lawsuit states.

The coroner determined that Daniel Barajas’s cause of death was multiple-systems blunt force trauma. He died by suicide, the coroner ruled.

•••

Barajas’s death shocked his family, Xexilia and Raquel recalled in a recent interview with the Guardian. They wanted to believe the official account, they said, but as they sought more information they encountered pushback from local authorities. They learned that Barajas’s wallet, keys, cash box and cellphone were missing.

“We are not a family that’s in denial. The story doesn’t make sense,” Xexilia said.

Raquel, an immigration lawyer, and Xexilia, a vice-president at a financial firm, hired Laux, who requested files from the county and state police.

“In over 20 years as a lawyer, and a solid 18 years doing high-end civil rights litigation, I have never seen more poorly and incompetently written reports,” he said. “Those reports raise immediate red flags.”

The deputies’ accounts appear to contradict each other, with some stating that Barajas’s SUV was in the middle of the road and another stating it was partially blocking the road. The deputies did not take photos of Barajas’s vehicle before or after his death. One deputy described Barajas as responsive, while another, describing the same interaction, said that he refused to answer questions.

Some of the reports from different deputies contain copied-and-pasted sentences describing Barajas. The report from the canine officer includes a passage referring to an entirely different incident unrelated to Barajas. One deputy who was on scene the entire time is not listed in any of the deputies’ reports and never filed a report himself – a highly unusual occurrence, Laux said.

The coroner’s report referenced photos of Barajas’s remains, but the office later said it had lost the images, Laux said. The family said that coroner declined their request for autopsy and toxicology reports, citing the condition of Barajas’s body.

Barajas’s cellphone, keys, wallet and a cash box containing $2,000 were never recovered.

State investigators did not preserve radio call recordings, the lawsuit states, which they attributed to an unexplained issue with their system. There is no footage of his interaction with police from body-worn or dashboard cameras.

In the lawsuit, Laux contends that Barajas’s vehicle was never on the on-ramp and that the deputies profiled him and used excessive force, leaving him injured, disoriented and causing him to stagger on to the highway.

Raquel suspects Barajas would have pushed back against the deputies’ attempts to stop and search him.

“He would have refused because he did nothing wrong,” she said. “I would always talk to him about that – you have all these rights. He would have had no problem invoking those rights.”

The road where he was left was precarious, Barajas’s sisters said. They visited the area last year. The semis moved so fast it shook their car, Xexilia recalled, and there’s a bend in the road where it’s impossible to see oncoming traffic. The woods in that area are tall and dense, leaving everything pitch-black.

The deputies had no right to tell Barajas that he couldn’t drive, Laux said, and if they believed he was experiencing mental health issues they should not have left him there.

“If he was having a mental health crisis, or if he was on drugs, which he wasn’t, how do you leave a guy like that on the side of the road?” he said. “You wouldn’t leave your dog on the highway that morning but they left a guy who at least one [deputy] claimed was suicidal.”

The reports from deputies were all written after they knew Barajas was dead, Laux said.

Neither the Saline county sheriff’s office or the coroner’s office responded to a request for comment. The Arkansas state police declined to comment on the case, citing pending litigation.

•••

The family hopes to see the lawsuit – which was originally filed in New Mexico but transferred to Arkansas and refiled to include the state police – result in a trial in which the deputies will be deposed and they can get answers, and justice.

“We can’t let this go. We really need these police officers to be held accountable,” Raquel said.

The case has garnered widespread attention and support, including from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the US. His sisters have tried to tell people who Barajas was when he was alive – a man they describe as vibrant and hard-working who loved dogs, Chicago house music, traveling the highways, great food and cooking for his friends and family.

Raquel’s and Xexilia’s children never got to meet their uncle. Raquel keeps a picture of him in the entryway of her home and tells her son and daughter that their uncle is watching over them. Xexilia tells her daughter about Barajas when they sit under the stars in one of his favorite places: Taos, New Mexico.

“It’s like the sky is right there, like it’s gonna fall on you,” Xexilia said. “I’ll tell her, count the stars or say hi to Uncle D, and she’ll just point at the sky and she’ll say Uncle D.

“I’ll teach her everything he believed in and everything we fought for to get justice and truth.”

She hopes the trial provides long-awaited answers. “We don’t know anything more than we did when we first got that call. The more we ask questions, the more it’s become a mystery.”