yes its a true incident. to add on to the background:
from:
www.snopes.comThe 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.