The tension between Cortina and the Brownsville authorities broke into violence on 13 July 1859. Brownsville town marshal Robert Shears was brutalizing Cortina's 60-year-old former ranch hand. Cortina happened to pass by, and asked Shears to let him handle the situation; Shears is said to have yelled at him in reply, ""What is it to you, you damned Mexican?"" Cortina fired a warning shot, then when Shears did not stop, he intervened and shot him in the shoulder. Cortina pulled the man up to his horse and quickly left the scene. On the 28 September he raided and occupied the town with a coterie of seventy men. Cortina's enemies had fled in the meantime, and during the occupation of Brownsville, he issued a famous proclamation to reveal his intentions to both communities. ""(...) There is no need of fear. Orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests. Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished. These have connived with each other, and form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin, considering us, doubtless, destitute of those gifts which they themselves do not possess. (...) Mexicans! Peace be with you! Good inhabitants of the State of Texas, look on them as brothers, and keep in mind that which the Holy Spirit saith: "Thou shalt not be the friend of the passionate man; nor join thyself to the madman, lest thou learn his mode of work and scandalize thy soul."" (Proverbs 22:24-25)