On Monday, May 8, 2017, Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams stood beside Mayor Greg Stanton and Maricopa County's top prosecutor and named the man police believed had been shooting people on the streets of Phoenix for close to a year. He was Aaron Juan Saucedo, twenty-three, a former city bus driver. He was already in jail. Police booked him on twenty-six felony counts covering twelve shootings between August 2015 and July 2016 in which nine people had died.
"This case plagued our community for more than a year," Williams said, "and left behind a trail of victims that included mothers, sons, brothers, sisters and families still mourning the loss of their loved ones."
More than nine years later the case has not reached a jury. Saucedo has said in court that he is innocent. His lawyers have raised questions about his competency and his intellectual capacity, the prosecution has asked for the death penalty, and trial dates in 2019, 2021 and 2024 have come and gone. As of October 2026 the trial is set to begin in December. Nothing in this page has been proved in court.
Little about Saucedo's life before his arrest has been made public. Associated Press reporting at the time of the arrest said he had worked as a City of Phoenix bus driver, through a temporary agency, for several months from July to August 2015. Court records later described by KTAR and Phoenix New Times show that in 2016 he worked at a local business with colleagues who would later call police about him, and that he then changed jobs and became a laborer. He was stopped by police on October 27, 2015, for allegedly running a red light.
In a long 2026 account for the Arizona Mirror, the reporter Michael Kiefer, who covered the case from the start, described Saucedo as slight and unassuming, and wrote that his father is a performer and music promoter known in the state's Mexican community. Neither of his parents has spoken publicly about the charges in any source found for this page.
What is known about his mental health comes almost entirely from court filings summarized by the Arizona Mirror. His lawyers have argued that he may be intellectually disabled. He tested at an IQ of 70 on at least two occasions going back to 2017, according to Kiefer, and experts have reportedly diagnosed autism, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. His most recent test results are sealed.
Police say the series began in August 2015 in central Phoenix with a death in Saucedo's own family circle. According to court records reported by Phoenix New Times, on August 12, 2015, officers recovered 9mm shell casings at a house on Colter Street, where someone had fired into a screen door and an antique dresser. No one was hurt.
Four days later, on August 16, 2015, Raul Romero, sixty-one, was found shot to death in the driveway of his home. He had been in a relationship with Saucedo's mother. His daughter, Lora, described him to reporters as "an amazing, loving, caring, hardworking man." Romero's death was investigated as an ordinary homicide, and for a long time no one connected it to anything else. He is the only victim police say Saucedo knew.
The pistol police later tied to the Romero killing was a 9mm Hi-Point. Court records reported by KTAR say Saucedo bought it at a pawn shop on July 2, 2015, and sold it back to the same shop on September 1, 2015, sixteen days after Romero died. On the same day, according to the New Times account of the records, he bought a second gun, a Bryco Arms pistol.
That Hi-Point had a second history. In late August and early September 2015, Phoenix-area drivers were being shot at on Interstate 10, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety was searching for the gunman. As part of that inquiry, NBC News reported in 2017, DPS seized eight Hi-Point 9mm pistols from Phoenix-area pawn shops, including the one Saucedo had sold, and test-fired them. The state crime lab compared them one at a time against evidence from four freeway cases. The fourth gun it checked, which had been pawned by a man named Leslie Merritt Jr., was declared a match, and the lab stopped there. The other four guns, including the one later tied to Saucedo, were never analyzed and were sent back to the pawn shops within days.
Merritt was charged in the freeway shootings and spent more than 200 days in jail before prosecutors dismissed the case after an independent ballistics expert challenged the match. In 2017 he had filed a $10 million lawsuit. Merritt and Saucedo had pawned their guns at the same shop.
"If you lose one of your children at a carnival and then you find the child, you don't continue to look for the child," a DPS spokesman, Raul Garcia, told NBC News when asked why the other guns were not examined. "We were investigating the freeway shooting case and not anything else." Merritt's lawyer, Jason Lamm, said the episode "certainly begs the hypothetical question as to whether other crimes could have been prevented." Police Chief Williams said there was no evidence linking Saucedo to the freeway shootings, in which no one was killed.
Police say the shooter went quiet for several months and returned on January 1, 2016. In the early morning, Jesse Olivas, twenty-two, was shot while standing in front of a home near 59th Avenue and Encanto Boulevard in Maryvale. His was widely reported as the first fatal shooting in Phoenix that year. His mother told the Arizona Republic he was kindhearted and often asked her for money so that he could help feed homeless people, and his family said he may have been walking home from doing that when he was shot. His sister, Hosanna Lopez, said after the arrest: "We can prevent it from happening to another family, because it can be anybody else's family also."
The Olivas case was not part of the serial investigation until 2017. According to the court records described by Phoenix New Times, the bullets in his body were linked to the Bryco pistol Saucedo had bought on September 1, 2015. Saucedo's father, the records say, took that gun from his son "for safety concerns," and police later recovered it in a search. Sources disagree on its caliber: KTAR described it as a .380 and New Times as a .38.
The court records say Saucedo bought another 9mm pistol in February 2016, on February 21 according to KTAR. Police say that gun was used in the last nine shootings in the series, between March and July 2016.
On March 17, 2016, at about 11:30 at night, a sixteen-year-old boy was wounded while walking in the street on the 1100 block of East Moreland Street. AP reported that the gunman shot at two teenage boys and hit one in the arm. The next night, March 18, a twenty-one-year-old man standing near his car on the 4300 block of North 73rd Avenue was shot at; reports differ on whether he was hit.
On April 1, 2016, Diego Verdugo-Sanchez, twenty-one, was shot at about nine in the evening in front of the home of his fiancée's family in Maryvale and died at a hospital. His partner, Marina Smith, was seven months pregnant with their son. Phoenix New Times reported that the couple had called the baby their "miracle baby," after a string of miscarriages.
On April 19, 2016, at about 4:35 in the morning, Krystal Annette White, fifty-five, was found dead of a gunshot wound along a street east of downtown, near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, miles from Maryvale. She was a mother of six. Her daughter BreAngela White told NBC News she had been visiting an elderly friend and may have gone out to a store. Acquaintances told the Arizona Republic she had worked the streets for many years and was doing so then to help pay for her daughter's wedding. Her age is given as fifty-five in most reports; one AP list said sixty.
On June 3, 2016, Horacio de Jesus Peña, thirty-two, was shot outside his house in Maryvale after coming home from work. He was an avid runner and a nutritionist at an organization that served people with disabilities; that day, Phoenix New Times reported, he had been showing people with cerebral palsy that a balanced diet could taste good. Six years later his sister, Nancy Peña, was still waiting. She told ABC15 in 2022 that the family wanted the case resolved.
On June 10, 2016, Manuel Castro Garcia, nineteen, known as Manny, was shot after a vehicle pulled up beside his car near 65th Avenue and Coronado Road. He drove a few houses farther, crashed and died at a hospital. He had graduated from Maryvale High School shortly before. People who knew him called him a gentle giant. His father, Margarito Castro, told a community forum that summer that his son "was a good person" who "didn't have problems with anyone." His mother, Gisela Castro, described him as a noble young man who studied and worked hard and would rather play basketball with friends than go to parties.
In the early hours of June 12, 2016, came the deadliest attack in the series. Stefanie Ellis, thirty-three, and Angela Linner, thirty-one, were sitting in a car in the driveway of their home, listening to music. Stefanie's twelve-year-old daughter, Maleah, had been asleep on the couch inside, and woke and followed her mother out to the car. Shots were fired into the car. A family friend, Sharon Layton, who was in the house, ran out and found the two women unresponsive in the front seats and Maleah gasping in the back, shot in the neck. Layton tried to stop the bleeding. "You took a child from her mother. You took a mom from her children," she said in August 2016, when she spoke publicly in the hope that someone would come forward. Maleah, the Arizona Republic reported, had wanted to be a cheerleader, like her mother. Angela Linner loved music.
Maleah died at the scene. Accounts disagree about which of the two women died that night. An AP-based Fox News report in July 2016 said Linner and Maleah were found dead and Stefanie Ellis was critically injured and died later; Layton's account to ABC15 said Stefanie died in a hospital a couple of weeks afterward; a Phoenix New Times victim list said Linner died almost a month later. ABC15 described Linner as Stefanie's partner, other outlets as her friend. Later that same morning, at about 2:35 a.m. according to NBC News, an unoccupied car was shot up on the 6200 block of West Mariposa Drive.
The last shooting police attribute to the series came on July 11, 2016, when a gunman fired at a car carrying a twenty-one-year-old man and his four-year-old nephew. Neither was hurt.
By early July 2016 Phoenix police were publicly treating the shootings as the work of one gunman. On July 12 or 13 they linked four more shootings to the series, bringing the count then to seven deaths in eight incidents, and released a composite sketch of a thin, light-skinned Hispanic man with dark hair, possibly in his twenties. Law enforcement sources told NBC News that physical evidence connected the murders. The FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined the effort. The reward for information, offered through Silent Witness, began at $30,000 and rose to $75,000. Police received about 3,300 tips.
"Someone out there knows who did this," then Police Chief Joe Yahner said. At a community forum, Sgt. Jonathan Howard told residents he was not asking people to be fearful, but to raise their awareness "to a healthy level."
Witnesses described the shooter's car variously as a white Cadillac or Lincoln-type sedan and as a black, late-1990s or early-2000s BMW 5 Series. Most of the victims were young Latino men or Black women and girls, and seven of the nine deaths were in Maryvale, Phoenix's most populous urban village. The Guardian Angels patrolled the neighborhood, and some shopkeepers closed early because the attacks came after dark. Residents described staying inside at night. Rosa Pastrana, who ran a block watch group, said after the arrest that she was glad her children would be able to walk outside again.
The break, according to court documents described by KTAR and Phoenix New Times, came in August 2016, about three weeks after the composite sketch was released. Two of Saucedo's coworkers called police. They said he looked like the man in the sketch, that he had recently grown facial hair, and that he had driven an early-2000s black BMW 5 Series but had stopped driving it.
On December 22, 2016, police interviewed Saucedo, then a person of interest. He told them he had access to the BMW and that he owned a 9mm handgun, bought from a pawn shop, which he said had been stolen from his car. He filed a police report about the theft only after the interview, the records say. Investigators traced the purchase to February 2016, which placed the gun in his hands during the period when the spring and summer shootings occurred.
Months then passed in public silence. The investigation appeared to have stalled, AP reported at the time of the arrest, as leads dried up.
In April 2017 detectives charged Saucedo with the murder of Raul Romero. According to court documents cited by CNN, they had found the Hi-Point he sold to the pawn shop and matched it to evidence at the Romero scene, and police said ammunition he bought matched the casings found there. He was formally charged in the Romero case on April 21, 2017. According to the criminal complaint, he denied killing Romero.
On April 25, with reports circulating of a person of interest, Chief Williams said the department "cannot allow the release of unconfirmed information to jeopardize justice for anyone." Two weeks later, on May 8, she announced that he was the suspect in the serial case.
After the Romero arrest, police seized Saucedo's black 2001 BMW and a grey 2003 Hyundai Sonata, cars he told investigators he had owned at the times witnesses and video placed the shooter's vehicles at the scenes. According to the unsealed records, a search of the Hyundai found thirteen 9mm casings and one casing from the second pistol, and the BMW held another 9mm casing; crime technicians matched them to guns used in the shootings. Police said that bullets and casings from the scenes and from autopsies were linked to three guns Saucedo had owned, and that the 9mm from February 2016 was used in nine of the shootings.
At the press conference police did not explain how the break had come, beyond crediting tips from the public, and they offered no motive. Every victim but Romero, Williams said, had been chosen at random.
The booking on May 8, 2017, listed eight counts of homicide, three of attempted homicide, six of drive-by shooting, five of aggravated assault, and one each of endangerment, discharging a firearm at a structure, discharging a firearm at a nonresidential structure and criminal damage, alongside the Romero murder charge already filed.
At a hearing that month Saucedo told the judge, "I'm innocent." At another brief hearing on June 19, 2017, he answered only questions about his name and date of birth. He wore leg chains and dark plastic-framed glasses. His lawyer at that stage, Dean Roskosz, declined to comment.
A Maricopa County grand jury indicted him in late June 2017 on nine counts of first-degree murder and a series of related charges. At his arraignment on July 6, 2017, his lawyers waived his presence and not guilty pleas were entered on all counts. The defense objected to a camera in the courtroom; Commissioner Thomas Kaipio allowed it, after a request from news organizations represented by the lawyer David Bodney.
At a 2017 hearing, Phoenix New Times reported, prosecutors said they had 5,000 pages of records and 96 CDs of evidence. By November 2017 the defense said it was working through thousands of pages, and the judge called it a complicated case. In December 2017 the Maricopa County Attorney's Office filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, arguing in court papers signed by the prosecutor Juan Martinez that the killings were committed in a cold and calculated manner. KTAR reported in January 2018 that prosecutors intended to seek death for eight of the nine deaths. The Arizona Mirror, in 2026, wrote that he faces nine possible death sentences. The case was assigned to Superior Court Judge David Cunanan, and a trial date was set for November 4, 2019.
The questions about Saucedo's mind began almost at once. In December 2017 the court ordered IQ, competency and sanity prescreening evaluations. His lawyers filed papers opposing IQ and sanity testing. By January 2018 he had missed six straight court hearings, and the judge gave the defense sixty more days to review the evidence in order to challenge the grand jury proceedings. The defense also moved to keep the state from seeing records and videos of his jail visits, arguing some of them were privileged.
In July 2019 Saucedo was disciplined twice for refusing to go to court hearings; he told detention officers that his lawyers had given him a document saying he did not need to attend. In August 2019, ABC15 reported, both the defense, then led by Thomas Glow and Peter Jones, and the prosecution were asking the court to determine whether he was competent to stand trial. The November 2019 trial date was lost.
Under Arizona's Rule 11, a defendant found incompetent can be treated with the aim of restoring competency, which requires only that he understand the charges and be able to help his lawyers. The Arizona Mirror reported that Saucedo was declared incompetent on at least one occasion. The dates of those findings were not reported in any source found for this page.
A new trial date in May 2021 fell through, in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2022 the trial was moved to February 2024. Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell blamed the size of the case. "There are just some realities when you have something like that, that is that complicated," she said. "We want to do it right." Saucedo's lawyers said more than 200 witnesses still had to be interviewed. The February 2024 date also passed.
Separately from competency, the defense has raised a claim under Atkins v. Virginia, the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that bars the execution of people with intellectual disability. His two IQ scores of 70 sit at the threshold usually cited for that claim, the Arizona Mirror noted. No ruling on it has been reported.
The most detailed recent account is Kiefer's Arizona Mirror report of July 6, 2026, titled "9 years, 9 murder charges, no trial." According to court records cited there, Saucedo was most recently found competent in March 2026. He was thirty-two and had been in the Maricopa County jail since 2017. A settlement conference was scheduled for July 2026; a county court order issued that January required one in every capital case within six months. Such conferences are mandatory in capital cases and, the Mirror noted, do not necessarily signal a plea deal. Neither prosecutors nor defense lawyers would comment, and calls and messages to the victims' families and to Saucedo's family went unanswered.
The county attorney's office was brief. "It remains a capital case," its spokesperson said. "Trial is scheduled for later this year." The trial is set for December 2026 and is expected to last about sixteen months. No public report of the outcome of the July settlement conference was found for this page, and no plea agreement had been reported as of mid-October 2026.
Saucedo is presumed innocent. If the trial goes ahead as scheduled, it will be the first time any of the evidence described above is tested in front of a jury.
The Serial Street Shooter was not the city's first such case. In 2017 AP recalled an earlier series of random nighttime shootings, more than ten years before, in which six people were killed and nineteen wounded. It was solved when a drinking companion of one of the two killers told police he had bragged about the shootings. The Arizona Mirror identifies that case as the 2006 "Serial Shooters" case, in which Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were convicted; the Mirror puts the number of murders at eight, AP the number killed at six. Dieteman was sentenced to life. Hausner was sentenced to death and died by suicide in his cell. Phoenix New Times noted in 2017 that if Saucedo were convicted of nine murders, he would tie Mark Goudeau, the convicted Baseline Killer, as the deadliest serial killer in Arizona history.
AP's Jacques Billeaud drew the contrast in 2017. The earlier case was solved through a tip from someone close to the killers. In this one, investigators struggled for months even though eyewitnesses had identified the suspect's car as a BMW and the police sketch resembled the man they eventually arrested.
For the families, the years since the arrest have mostly been years of waiting. In May 2017 Gisela Castro said the arrest felt like reliving the day she learned of her son's death. "I waited every day for justice, but things don't change," she said. "The pain is the same." Marina Smith, whose son was born after Diego Verdugo-Sanchez was killed, said detectives had kept her in the dark, and that "the fact of them finding somebody, at least it was some type of news."
Nancy Peña told ABC15 in 2022 that her family was still waiting for the case to be resolved. By 2026, the Arizona Mirror found, the families were no longer answering reporters' calls.
The connection between Saucedo and the shootings rests, as far as the public record shows, on the coworkers' tip, the composite sketch, the cars, his statements to detectives in December 2016, and the tracing of shell casings and bullets to three guns he bought. None of that has been tested at trial, and his lawyers have not set out a public defense.
Kiefer wrote in 2026 that he was among the journalists who in 2017 showed the police composite sketch to a surviving victim, who did not recognize it. Kiefer also obtained and published video of Saucedo in his jail cell after he repeatedly missed hearings, which drew criticism from lawyers.
The count of victims has changed over time. In July 2016 police listed seven deaths in eight incidents. In May 2017 they linked Saucedo to nine deaths in twelve shootings, adding Romero and Olivas, which had not been part of the original investigation. Reports of how many people were wounded vary between two and three.
No motive has been stated. Police said only that all the victims except Romero appear to have been strangers to him. AZ Mirror's account said the arrest left no apparent motive "except perhaps" for the Romero killing.
Some recent accounts have begun calling him "the Maryvale Killer," though, as the Mirror pointed out, only some of the deaths happened in Maryvale. Police said there was no evidence connecting him to the 2015 Interstate 10 shootings, and DPS continued to describe Leslie Merritt as its suspect in those in 2017, though the charges against Merritt were dismissed.
July 2, 2015: Saucedo buys a 9mm Hi-Point pistol at a pawn shop, court records say.
July to August 2015: Works as a city bus driver through a temporary agency.
August 12, 2015: Shots fired into a house on Colter Street; 9mm casings recovered.
August 16, 2015: Raul Romero, 61, shot dead in his driveway in central Phoenix.
Late August to September 2015: DPS seizes and test-fires the Hi-Point during the I-10 shooting inquiry, then returns it untested against other cases.
September 1, 2015: Saucedo sells the Hi-Point back to the pawn shop and buys a Bryco pistol.
January 1, 2016: Jesse Olivas, 22, shot dead in Maryvale.
February 2016: Saucedo buys another 9mm pistol.
March 17 and 18, 2016: Two shootings; a 16-year-old wounded.
April 1, 2016: Diego Verdugo-Sanchez, 21, killed.
April 19, 2016: Krystal Annette White, 55, killed near the airport.
June 3, 2016: Horacio de Jesus Peña, 32, killed.
June 10, 2016: Manuel Castro Garcia, 19, killed.
June 12, 2016: Stefanie Ellis, 33, Maleah Ellis, 12, and Angela Linner, 31, shot; an unoccupied car is also shot up.
July 11, 2016: Last attack: shots at a car carrying a man and his 4-year-old nephew.
July 2016: Police link the shootings publicly and release a composite sketch.
August 2016: Two coworkers tell police Saucedo resembles the sketch.
December 22, 2016: Police interview Saucedo.
April 21, 2017: Charged with Romero's murder.
May 8, 2017: Named as the Serial Street Shooter suspect and booked on 26 counts.
Late June 2017: Indicted on nine counts of first-degree murder and other charges.
July 6, 2017: Not guilty pleas entered.
December 2017: Prosecutors file notice to seek the death penalty; trial set for November 4, 2019.
August 2019: Both sides seek a competency determination; the trial date is lost.
May 2021 and February 2024: Later trial dates pass.
March 2026: Court finds Saucedo competent.
July 2026: Settlement conference scheduled.
December 2026: Capital trial scheduled to begin.