Lawyer Ben Gideon is representing the family of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, the 25-year-old Colombian immigrant fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Biddeford last Monday.
The move puts one of Maine’s most prominent and politically connected lawyers at the center of a case that has drawn national attention and reignited scrutiny of ICE’s use of deadly force during vehicle stops and comes a day after the agent who fired the fatal shots was identified for the first time. Gideon appeared with Duran’s family at a Thursday news conference.
Duran was shot several times at the intersection of Pool and Hill streets around 7 a.m. Monday after ICE agents, who were conducting surveillance on the last known address of a person with a final order of removal, tried to stop a vehicle he was driving.
U.S. Sen. Angus King’s office has said Duran was not the target of the warrant. The Maine attorney general’s office has said Duran was attempting to flee when an agent opened fire. Duran, who worked as a food delivery driver, left behind a wife and 3-year-old daughter.
The agent who shot Duran is David Brouillette, 37, a Manchester resident and recent ICE hire, according to his ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, who told the Portland Press Herald he called her shortly after the shooting and asked her to “lie for him” and “cover for his character.” She described him as “unusually calm” during the call.
Employment records show Brouillette previously worked as an officer with the police department that guards the Togus VA Medical Center campus. Before that, he spent less than a year as a corrections officer at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. It’s unclear when he left the Togus job. He was also removed from a volunteer fire department post in Manchester for shouting and refusing to follow a supervisor’s order, the Press Herald reported.
Gideon is a founding partner of Gideon Asen LLC, a Portland-based firm he started with Taylor Asen in 2020 after both left Berman & Simmons, then Maine’s largest plaintiff’s law firm. Gideon, a Yale Law School graduate, is married to former Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who lost a 2020 U.S. Senate race to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Gideon has built a career on high-dollar cases against corporations, insurers and government entities. In 2025, he and a colleague won a $25 million jury verdict in a medical malpractice case involving the death of a 15-year-old girl — the highest personal injury or malpractice verdict in Maine history. In April, he won a $6.5 million verdict in a Bangor medical malpractice case, the second-highest ever awarded by a Penobscot County jury.
He is one of the lead attorneys representing 100 victims of the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, where an Army reservist killed 18 people.
“The next step needs to be real accountability,” Gideon said in August 2024, after a state commission investigating the Lewiston shooting released its final report faulting the shooter’s Army Reserve superiors and local law enforcement for missed opportunities to intervene.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office and the FBI continue to investigate the shooting.