George Bush Kills Police Sgt., Updated

Version One -CNN, January 11:

Investigators said he may have been driven by a desire to avoid returning to Iraq.
Andres Raya was scheduled to report back to Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, on Sunday after a weekend leave.

Instead, police said, he went out with a semiautomatic rifle and drew officers into an ambush outside a liquor store in Ceres, a town of about 35,000 next door to his hometown of Modesto.

Raya's mother told the Modesto Bee that her son "came back different" from his last assignment, which included service in western Iraq's insurgent hotbed of Falluja.

"In speaking with family, they conveyed to us that their son did not desire to return to Iraq," said Lt. Bill Heyne, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department.

[...]

A statement from Camp Pendleton said Raya was on weekend liberty when he was killed. The Marine Corps is assisting police with the investigation, the statement said.

Raya was a driver in the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment -- an element of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, much of which is serving in Iraq.

According to the Marines, he had been awarded the National Defense Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Sea Service Deployment Ribbon.

The 19-year-old Marine who gunned down two police officers was a Norte�o gang member who plotted a deadly attack on police, not a veteran suffering the stress of war, investigators said Friday.

A toxicology report shows that Andres Raya was high on cocaine Sunday night when he shot and killed 39-year-old Sgt. Howard Stevenson and severely injured officer Sam Ryno, 49, outside George's Liquors on Caswell Avenue.

Information presented at a Friday news conference contrasted sharply with the image that police and Raya's family initially portrayed of the young man, that of a traumatized soldier who snapped and committed "suicide by cop."

"The easy answer to this would be to blame it on Iraq," said the lead investigator, Lt. Bill Heyne of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department.

But he said an investigation into Raya's background showed that he harbored violent tendencies and an anti-government attitude long before he went to war.

Raya, a lance corporal who worked as a Humvee driver, did not engage in combat during seven months in Iraq, Heyne said. But Raya saw a fellow Marine suffer a leg injury when a bomb exploded under a vehicle in his convoy.

Raya bragged to Marine buddies that he had bought an SKS rifle in Modesto and left it with one of his "boys." It was capable of carrying 30 rounds of high-powered ammunition. When they asked Raya why he needed the weapon, he replied that a 7.62-caliber round could penetrate a cop's armor, Heyne said.