Recently the footage of a 16 year-old-boy drinking concentrated liquid methamphetamine in front of two border officers at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, aired on ABC’s “20/20.” I’m not sure what has me more surprised: the footage or the fact that the CBP officers, Valerie Baird and Adrian Perallon, still have their job and no action was taken against them.

In the video, the officers are observing and are suspicious of what the two clear bottles were containing. Valerie Baird grabs the bigger bottle and puts it in front of Velazquez. In the video, you can clearly see how Baird gives a gesture to him, which implies that she instructed him to drink it. Velazquez takes the first sip of what later on would be the cause of his death. The second sip he took seems to be encouraged by Perallon. While Velazquez is taking the second sip, the video clearly shows how these two officers turned and smiled at each other. It doesn’t stop there; Velazquez still took two more sips of the poison, while these officers knew exactly what was going on.

Under oath, Perallon claims that Velazquez volunteered to drink from the bottle. On the other hand, when Baird was asked if she felt guilty for Velazquez's death she answered "no".

There are plenty of different perspectives that can be taken into consideration while examining this complicated and delicate case.

The first viewpoint can be that he should not have been smuggling drugs in the first place. True, I cannot argue there, however, we all make mistakes in life. With that being said, we all deserve a second opportunity. This incident could have changed his life for the better or perhaps along with his way, he could have picked a different route for his life. But now we’ll never know what could have been, or the reasons why he was smuggling those drugs.

A second thought that came to mind was if the officers knew there was a drug substance inside the bottles, why didn’t they follow the protocol they were trained to do when a situation like this is presented. I’m not exactly sure of what the protocol consists of, but I highly doubt that it’s to make the smuggler consume the unknown substance so that the officers can know whether or not it's drugs. It just felt as if they made him their clown for their own entertainment. I mean, they did turn and smile with one another.

Thirdly, did he really deserve to die for his action? Nobody has the right to take anybody’s life away; I don’t care how powerful or impotent you are. It was said during the “20/20,” show that the sips of methamphetamine that Velazquez consumed were a hundred times stronger than an average dose of methamphetamine. Officers cannot be naive to the fact that any drug intake is dangerous and deadly to our body, so why punish someone like this?

Lastly, the U.S. government paid the family $1 million for the lawsuit. Not $1 million, nor all the money in the world is going to bring Velazquez back. Paying them that money is really not a victory for the family. They lost a son, while the two CBP officers are still working without any punishment for the actions they took upon this young man.