yes its a true incident. to add on to the background:
from: www.snopes.com
The circumstances behind this video took place on 19 December 2003,
when 47-year-old Ricardo Alfonso Cerna was stopped for a traffic
violation at about 9:30 A.M. in Muscoy (a residential suburb of San
Bernardino County, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles). Cerna fled
the scene (in his car and then on foot) before shooting the
pursuing officer, sheriff's deputy Michael Parham, twice in the
abdomen. (Deputy Parham survived the shooting.) Cerna was soon
arrested by San Bernardino police and taken to sheriff's
headquarters on Third Street, where he was placed in an interview
room just before 11 A.M. in preparation for questioning by Bobby
Dean, head of the San Bernardino County sheriff's homicide
unit.
When Dean stepped out of the room briefly to speak with a detective
in the hallway, Cerna pulled the .45-caliber handgun out of his
pants and shot himself in the head. Evidently a chain of mistakes
led to Cerna, a shooting suspect, being taken into custody without
either the arresting officers or the booking officers discovering
he had a large, heavy handgun concealed on his person:
[Sheriff Gary] Penrod said deputies failed to adequately search
Cerna before he was put in a car, and again when he was transferred
to the homicide division office. Each receiving deputy may have
wrongly assumed the previous officer adequately searched the man,
he said.
Penrod said confusion among the three agencies involved the
Highway Patrol, San Bernardino police and the Sheriff's Department
may have contributed to the oversight.
"Obviously there was a mistake made," Penrod said by phone. "It was
hectic and it was a guy who was cuffed by somebody other than the
transporting officer.
(This apparently egregious oversight led to conspiracy-theory
speculation in some quarters that Cerna had been "executed" by the
San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, or that the sheriff returned
the gun to Cerna and urged him to commit suicide with it the
completely implausible scenario of officers' deliberately handing a
loaded gun to a suspect who had already shot one policeman
notwithstanding.)
As the how the video of Cerna's suicide made it onto the Internet,
sheriff's spokesman Chip Patterson said:
[A] ranking official at the department was authorized to show the
video during a presentation on officer safety at the FBI's training
academy in Quantico, Va., several months ago.
Following the presentation, dozens of copies of the video were made
at the request of law-enforcement agencies across the country.
Officials of those agencies wanted the copies for training
purposes.
Sheriff's officials do not know who might have leaked the video to
the public. Some of the officers involved in Cerna's arrest and
handling were subjected to disciplinary action, but sheriff's
officials wouldn't comment on the specifics of that action or
identify the officers involved.
note to viewers: its not overtly gory. no exploding brains etc, but
there is a significant gushing of blood from the wound.
