An ex-wife of the ICE agent accused of fatally shooting a Colombian immigrant in Maine this past week — who was in the U.S. legally, according to his family — believes the tragedy could have been avoided entirely if the federal officials tasked with vetting new hires had simply contacted her before issuing the 37-year-old rookie a badge and a gun.
Ashley Brouillette said ICE’s background investigators never got in touch while considering her ex-husband and high school sweetheart David Brouillette, who joined ICE late last year, for the job.
When she heard that he had been named as the agent behind the deadly encounter, Ashley said she “was shocked, but I wasn’t shocked.”
“For years, I told people he was going to hurt somebody,” she told The Independent. “I told everyone that if I ever ended up dead, that David would be the one to look at. We’ve been divorced for 17 years and he still calls me and leaves threatening messages and stuff.”
Yet, the nation’s immigration enforcement agency never bothered to ask the first of David Brouillette’s three wives whether or not she thought he had the temperament to work in law enforcement.
“They didn’t reach out at all,” she said. “When David told me back in November that he accepted a job with ICE, and that he wasn’t going to start for a couple of months, I thought, honest to God, he was bullsh***ing me. I’m used to him saying wacky things when he calls me drunk.”
She said she didn’t think anything more of it, until the morning of July 14, when she woke up to a call from CNN inquiring about reports that her ex had shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero a day earlier during an ICE traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine.
Durán Guerrero, who reportedly had permission to work in the U.S. and had been issued a Social Security number, was not the “intended target” of the ICE operation
Had ICE done more robust due diligence, Durán might still be alive, according to Brouillette.
“This could have been 100 percent preventable,” she said.
She isn’t his only former partner speaking out.
On Saturday, David Brouillette’s second wife Lucinda Brouillette sent a message to reporters recounting what she described as her ex’s history of violent behavior.
“If you were to ask me whether I believe David Brouillette is capable of this level of extreme violence, my answer is unequivocally yes,” she wrote.
“Throughout our marriage and in the years that followed, I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression, and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life threatening violence, and I often believed I would be the one on the receiving end of it,” she said.
In court this week, she sought a protective order against him and for temporary sole custody of their 11-year-old daughter.
She had previously accused her ex-husband of kicking down her door and alleging that he routinely and falsely accused her of having substance-use issues to undermine her credibility in court, according to court records obtained by the Portland Press Herald.
Lucinda Brouillette, who was married to David while he was in the military, has also claimed that her ex sent videos of her in intimate settings to other people and was verbally and physically abusive to his daughters, according to the newspaper.
“Throughout the years, I brought my concerns to law enforcement, the courts, and the Department of Health and Human Services,” she wrote Saturday. “I tried to explain what I believed was a long-standing pattern of abuse, intimidation, manipulation, and controlling behavior because I genuinely feared where those behaviors could lead. From my perspective, those warnings did not receive the attention I believed they deserved.”
Ashley shared a voicemail with The Independent that David left her after she took out a restraining order against him in late 2025, in which he said he wanted her to die and that she and others in her “bloodline” should have their “f****** throats cut.”
In an email, an ICE spokesperson declined to address the shooting, Brouillette specifically, or his hiring.
“We will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers,” a spokesperson said. “Doxxing our officers put their lives and their families in serious danger. Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists. Now, thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”
David and Ashley Brouillette dated throughout high school, which Ashley described as “really great.”
“You couldn’t ask for a better boyfriend,” she told The Independent.
They married in 2007, and the problems began soon after he joined the Maine Army National Guard that same year, Ashley said.
David Brouillette served in the Maine National Guard from 2007 to 2010 and the Army from 2010 to 2015. He was deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013, leaving with the rank of sergeant.
