District Attorney Sean Teare questioned why federal officials sought a search warrant to look for drugs in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's work van more than a week following the fatal ICE shooting of the Houston contractor, saying it would be  completely out of character  for Salgado to have drugs in his vehicle.

Not only did Teare doubt the discovery of drugs on the vehicle's dash and elsewhere, he suggested that federal authorities didn't need the judge's signature to search the van, and they went out of their way to make the document public, Teare said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.

READ MORE: Everything we know about the fatal Houston ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

Houston's top prosecutor said he believes the Salgado family's explanation that the plastic baggies found in the van were filled with salt to mix with lemon and water for electrolytes. He said the use of illicit substances would have been atypical for Salgado, his brother and their two co-workers in the van.


 It is extraordinarily possible that those baggies contained exactly what the family says they contain, which is a homemade electrolyte mix for people that work out in the Texas heat in the middle of the summer every day,  said Teare, who said Salgado's wife made the packets every morning for his work crew.

Photographs from inside Lorenzo Salgado's work van show items wrapped in plastic on a floorboard and dashboard. A search warrant made public on Wednesday showed that FBI investigators sought access to the van to seize the items and test them as part of a drug investigation Courtesy/Department of Justice

Members of Teare's office observed the FBI's search of the vehicle Wednesday, but were not allowed to participate as investigators, the district attorney said. They know what was seized after the vehicle sat untouched for more than a week, he said. Teare demanded swift testing of the substance, but it hadn't been done as of Thursday, he said.

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