By Jacob Beltran
Source San Antonio Express-News
San Antonio SWAT officer Rhett Shoquist was behind the wheel of a police cruiser chasing a felon in a blue Mitsubishi Lancer, a chaotic pursuit that had started in the parking lot of a Southwest Side apartment complex.
Shoquist was new to SWAT, having served on the elite tactical unit for less than three months. A third-generation law enforcement officer, it was his dream job.
As the Lancer barreled toward downtown, the felon, who had recently bonded out of Bexar County jail, began firing an assault rifle through the car's rear window, according to a police report. Driving the car was a woman he'd allegedly kidnapped at gunpoint.
Bullets ricocheted off the pavement, striking the police car's undercarriage.
Then a 5.56 mm round pierced the police cruiser's windshield and hit Shoquist's right eye.
"My first thought was, 'My eye's gone,'" said the former Marine.
He thought the bullet was lodged in his brain.
Certain he was going to die, he conjured up mental images of his wife and their two young sons. "Those are the last things I wanted to think about before I died," he recalled.
Through an adrenaline-induced fog, Shoquist became aware of his partner, SWAT officer Adam Rule, who had been hit in his forearm by shrapnel. Rule's face loomed in front of his. He was telling Shoquist he would be OK, that the bullet had exited through his cheek.
Shoquist would later learn that his life may have been saved by a small decision he'd made that day: to wear sunglasses. It wasn't something he normally did.
When the high-velocity bullet struck the right lens of his Oakley Holbrook sunglasses, its trajectory changed, sparing him catastrophic brain damage.
"I was pretty lucky," said Shoquist, 34.
He and Rule weren't the only San Antonio officers wounded that day — Aug. 24, 2023 — by alleged gunman Jesse Garcia Jr., 29. Officer Raul Chavez was shot in the torso multiple times.
They were among 466 officers in the U.S. who were either killed or injured by firearms that year, marking a 10-year high, according to FBI data.
Iron determination
Shoquist, 34, avoids talking about the shooting in most circumstances, public and private. But he shared his harrowing experience in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News.
Two months after the bloody melee, Shoquist returned to work on the SWAT unit, where he still serves today. He's put in many hours of extra training to try to restore the skills and mental and physical readiness he'd had before the shooting.
It's been a difficult return to duty.
He has bullet fragments in his jaw, collarbone and neck. He has a prosthetic eye, but he prefers to wear an eye patch. His right cheek bears red scars.
He also has emotional scars.
"I had a little bit of anxiety when I came back," he said. "That's a pretty major thing that happened."
But Shoquist also has a flinty determination to remain a cop. He said quitting the San Antonio Police Department — and taking up a safer line up of work — was never an option. Policing is in his blood.
His paternal grandfather was an Austin police officer and later a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. His father, Wayne Shoquist, served 32 years in the SAPD, including a stint with the SWAT unit in the 1990s.
When Shoquist became a San Antonio police officer in December 2017, his sights were set on joining SWAT. The unit deploys to handle armed and barricaded subjects and hostage situations. It also assists the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal, state and local police agencies.
Shoquist served two years on patrol before joining the department's Street Crimes Unit, where he worked for five years.
In June 2023, he joined the department's SWAT team.
Shoquist says he has replayed the shooting thousands of times in his head.
"I didn't make a horrible tactical error — it was just a bad situation," he said. "I signed up for this job. I know the risks. I knew the risks that day. I would do it over again."
Bloody rampage
The roots of the rampage stretched back to June 22, 2023, when Jesse Garcia Jr. was released on $40,000 bond from the Bexar County jail. The charges against him at the time included being a felon in possession of a firearm, evading arrest with a vehicle and burglary of a vehicle.
Garcia, 29, already had a long rap sheet, with convictions for lying to police and illegal gun and drug possession.
His bondsman lost contact with him after his release, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest on Aug. 4, according to court records.
On Aug. 21, Garcia allegedly stole a cache of guns from a Navy officer who was staying at a West Side motel — 10 firearms, including a pair of AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, according to police reports.
After receiving a tip three days later that Garcia was at an apartment complex in the 100 block of Camelot Court, officers set up surveillance and called in SWAT. A big part of the unit's job is to apprehend dangerous criminals.
When Shoquist and Rule arrived, they spotted Garcia and approached him. Garcia fled, jumping into the Mitsubishi Lancer — driven by a woman he'd kidnapped moments before, according to the police report. Pressing a rifle against the woman, Garcia told her she "better drive or he was going to kill her because he wasn't going back to jail," the report states.
Shoquist jumped into the driver's seat of the patrol cruiser while Rule got in beside him, and the chase was on.
As the Lancer hurtled along South General McMullen Drive toward Highway 90 and downtown, Garcia began shooting at the officers through the back window, according to the police report.
He emptied a magazine, reloaded and resumed shooting.
The chase covered five miles, mostly on Highway 90 on the West Side and Interstate 35. The Mitsubishi then took the Nogalitos Street exit off I-35 and continued to the 100 block of Oriental Avenue.
That's where the chase ended for the two wounded SWAT officers.
But Garcia allegedly went on to cause even more chaos.
He headed by foot to an apartment complex in the 2600 block of Westward, continuing shoot as he exited the vehicle. That's when he wounded Chavez, a four-year veteran of the force, before barricading himself inside an apartment, according to the police report.
Garcia, who was uninjured, was arrested after a four-hour standoff. Booked into the Bexar County jail, he was charged with five counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer, two counts of aggravated robbery and one count of aggravated kidnapping.
His bail initially was set at $4.25 million. Later, a judge ordered that he be held without bail.
Garcia was also later indicted on an unrelated charge of assaulting a security officer, stemming from an incident on March 25, 2022.
The shootings of Shoquist and Chavez were part of a spate of assaults against San Antonio officers in the late summer of 2023.
Six officers were wounded and three suspects killed in a two-week span that August and September, setting off a public feud between Police Chief William McManus and Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales.
After the shooting of Shoquist and Chavez, McManus expressed frustration that Garcia, whom he described as "violent" and "dangerous," had been allowed back on the streets.
"Why wasn't he in jail? Why (weren't) his bonds increased? People want to know," McManus wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
Four days after the melee, the Bexar County District Attorney's Office held a news conference in which Gonzales and other officials blamed the criminal justice system, saying judges have little power to hold someone without bond.
"There's very few circumstances where judges have authority to remand somebody without bond on a case that they have not been convicted on," said Christian Henricksen, then-first assistant district attorney.
The aftermath
Shoquist was rushed to Brooke Army Military Medical Center, where his SWAT teammates lined the hallway, holding vigil outside his room.
He was in surgery for eight hours. The medical team tried to save right eye but couldn't.
Danny Diaz, president of the police union, visited the hospital the day after his surgery. He'd served with Shoquist's father and had known Rhett since he was a boy — their families played baseball together in police tournaments.
"The first thing out of his mouth: 'I'll be back soon,'" Diaz said.
In a second surgery, surgeons inserted a titanium plate in Shoquist's face to give form to his pulverized cheek and orbital bones. After that surgery, SWAT officers took turns staying with him at the hospital.
"Those were the guys who were right there for me," Shoquist said. "They were in my ear telling me I would be OK."
The public also stepped up, contributing to several fund-raisers for Shoquist, including a GoFundMe campaign that raised $17,245.
He left the hospital four days after he was shot.
When Shoquist came back to work two months later, he went through the "return to duty" protocol and received additional SWAT training before being cleared to take up his full range of duties.
Officer Greg Cummins, who works in the SAPD's mental wellness unit, is one of the few people Shoquist talks to about the psychological fallout he's experiencing from the shooting.
They have a powerful connection: Cummins previously worked in the SWAT unit.
The SWAT officers must meet SAPD's highest standards. The small, tight-knit unit of 25 officers and three sergeants are trained to use high-powered firearms and carry out tactical maneuvers on some of the department's most dangerous calls.
SWAT officers are considered the top 1% of the department, Cummins said, and the job demands on them are heavy.
"You could be at the birth of your child, and if it's an all-call, you will be there," Cummins said.
SWAT officers must be physically and mentally fit and ready for anything.
Shoquist, who was right-eye dominant, retrained himself to shoot from his left side. He drilled for hours at a time.
"I want to show everybody that I'm here for the team," he said.
In one of his exercises, he works to strengthen his left eye's peripheral vision by using a series of blinking red and green lights to help train his eye to focus on a target.
With some modifications to his rifle, such as raising his scope to improve his line of sight and accuracy, he is able to continue shooting with his right hand.
"It's less about now figuring out how to do it with one eye — it's more about doing my job at the highest level possible," he said.
Shoquist received advice and encouragement from fellow SWAT officers and Cummins.
"A lot of people can be completely defeated with that injury, and they've given up, " Cummins said. "His response is where the story is."
Even before Shoquist had physically recovered enough to return to work, he was spending time with his teammates at the SWAT office.
"He's a very strong-willed individual. He could have hung it up and not come back at all," Diaz said. "That is a feat that is very difficult, and that young man has mastered it in a short amount of time."
Cummins is a former student of professor Mark Jones, who leads the University of Texas at San Antonio's neurofeedback program, which studies brainwaves linked to post traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems. Jones studied Shoquist as he worked to regain his visual-processing capabilities.
"There's a lot of first responders who lose an eye and unfortunately just wind up retiring," Jones said. "Here's one person who shows potential for rehabilitation and maintaining their level of functioning."
Getting help
Shoquist has accepted help from he department's wellness unit, established several years after a spate of suicides in the department. The program offers confidential psychological and social services to officers.
SAPD Sgt. Tina Baron, who oversees the unit, said it's staffed by specially trained officers who have worked throughout the police department. "If anyone can speak to how it's impacting you and your life and everyone at home, it's going to be a fellow officer," she said.
Still, police officers often have a hard time asking for help with when they're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I don't think anybody that does this job wants to be perceived as weak, physically or emotionally, mentally, anything like that," Shoquist said.
Cummins said a common misconception among officers is that if they seek help, it'll look like they're quitting.
"The vast majority of people would have just thrown in the towel and said, 'Look at me — I'm a victim,'" Cummins said. Shoquist "did the direct opposite."
After his brush with death, Shoquist has renewed his focus on his family — his wife of seven years and their two children, now 5 and 2.
"Had I died that day, nothing would have changed for the police department," he said. "The only thing that would have changed is that my wife would have been a widow and my kids would have been fatherless."
And his job on the SWAT team? It would have been quickly filled.
"That's the nature of it," he said. "It's nothing against the department — I'm not saying the department is wrong. I'm a replaceable person in this department, but I'm not replaceable to my wife and to my kids."
Days after the shooting, his son, who was 4 at the time, asked what happened. Shoquist tried to be as honest as he could.
"Daddy got hurt at work, but I'm OK... Daddy got shot," he told his son.
"Did you shoot him?" his son asked. "Did you arrest him?"
"Daddy's friends arrested him," Shoquist said.
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