It was a crime spree that killed nine people, stumped the police for months and left residents of Phoenix unnerved.
On Monday, Arizona authorities announced that they had arrested a 23-year-old man in what came to be known as the Serial Street Shooter case.
At an afternoon news conference, Phoenix police chief Jeri Williams said the authorities had linked the shootings to Aaron Saucedo, who has been in police custody since his arrest on April 19 in the first of the nine killings.
He was rebooked on Monday into a Maricopa County jail on 26 additional felony counts, including eight of homicide, three of attempted homicide, and several of drive-by shooting and aggravated assault, Williams said.
“This case plagued our community for more than a year, as the mayor mentioned to you, and left behind a trail of victims that included mothers, sons, brothers, sisters and families still mourning the loss of their loved ones,” she said at an afternoon news conference before listing each attack.
City, county and federal law enforcement officials put tens of thousands of hours into investigating the case and received approximately 3,300 tips, some of which led to Saucedo, Phoenix police spokesman Sergeant Jon Howard said.
In all, Saucedo was booked for 12 shootings that occurred from August 2015 to July last year.
In addition to the nine people killed, two were wounded.
Maricopa County attorney Bill Montgomery said his office planned to review the evidence and evaluate which charges to pursue in order to prepare the strongest case possible against Saucedo.
Williams said the first victim in the shootings was Raul Romero, 61, who was killed in August 2015.
The police said at the news conference that they had found no “correlation” between Saucedo and the victims, though the Arizona Republic reported that Romero had been dating Saucedo’s mother when he was killed.
Many of the shootings took place in southwest Phoenix, with the victims targeted as they stood outside homes or walked about the area’s predominantly Latino, working-class neighborhoods.
The shootings stymied the authorities for months, and the police are still unsure of Saucedo’s motive.
“It’s been said that a serial killer is like a chameleon, and that’s what made this case so frustrating,” US Marshal for the District of Arizona David Gonzales said.
The killing rampage continued until June last year, when Saucedo allegedly fatally shot three people. The next month, he shot at a 24-year-old man and the man’s 4-year-old nephew, though both were not wounded, Williams said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS