From ConsortiumNews.com via Common Dreams.org:

It’s a muddy cell phone video, taken from a difficult angle, but the audio recorded on the modest device, is both revealing and chilling: the contents cast doubt on claims by the U.S. Border Patrol, regarding the death of a Mexican national who died in custody after being beaten and electric-shocked by federal agents on May 28.

This video is stoking anger already simmering along the U.S.-Mexico border in part fueled by the June 7 shooting at the El Paso/Juarez crossing where a U.S. Border Patrol agent killed an unarmed Mexican junior high school student after a brief chase and scuffle. That case also involved a cell-phone video that appeared to contradict the self-defense claims of the Border Patrol.

In the May 28 incident, about 20 federal agents at the San Ysidro entry port at Tijuana, near San Diego, violently subdued and electric shocked Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a 42-year-old father of five U.S.-born children. He died three days later from his wounds in a case that the San Diego County coroner has ruled a homicide, indicating an act in which a person is killed by another person.

Capt. Jim Collins of the San Diego Police Department echoed the account given by federal agents that Border Patrol officers struck Hernandez Rojas with a baton and fired a Taser into his body at close range only after agents had taken his handcuffs off and he became unruly.

Customs and Border Protection released a formal statement claiming the victim “became combative,” forcing officers to use the electric shock Taser to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”

But other eye-witness accounts and the cell-phone video appear to contradict that account.

Here’s the video: