Video: Phoenix cop shoots unarmed man who was attempting to flee

Around 6:45 p.m. on Oct. 2, a Phoenix police officer shot a man outside a Burger King who turned out to be unarmed. Body-worn camera footage released by the Phoenix Police Department on Thursday showed that an officer shot the man as he was trying to flee, back turned, into the occupied restaurant.

According to police, the man remains in the hospital and will be turned over to the Arizona Department of Public Safety when he is discharged. Though police have not publicly named the man, an incident report obtained by Phoenix New Times in response to a records request identifies the man as 38-year-old Lee Anthony Johnson. Phoenix police confirmed to New Times that is the man’s name.

Johnson was the second person shot by Phoenix police on Oct. 2. That morning, Phoenix officers shot and killed 58-year-old Victor Altamirano, who was suicidal and stumbling away from police at the time. Though Altamirano initially charged an officer with a knife, he was standing 40-50 feet away from officers at the time he was shot. Altamirano was the ninth person killed by Phoenix police this year; there has since been a 10th killing. There have been six fatal police shootings — and four non-fatal shootings — since Aug. 19.

On Thursday, police released a “critical incident briefing” on the shooting of Johnson at the Burger King, located at 16th Street and Buckeye Road. The briefings are narrated by officers and contain snippets of dispatch audio, body-cam footage and other surveillance video. In response to a records request, police also released a longer video from the body-cam of Officer Jesus Resendez, who shot Johnson. Though many other officers were on the scene, only Resendez’s body-cam footage was provided to New Times.

The briefing includes 911 call audio from a Burger King manager who reported “a Black dude” who allegedly tried to steal a woman’s bike and was “acting really weird.” The woman said the man “keeps grabbing something on his, um, in his, um, thing.” A second caller, who did not appear to be on the scene but was relaying information to police from someone there, said that “someone is there with a gun.” Though the man was reported to be inside the restaurant at the time of the 911 calls, police found Johnson sitting outside the door when they arrived around 6:45 p.m.

‘Don’t shoot!’

According to the body-cam footage, Resendez — who was armed with a rifle — and other officers ordered Johnson to lie flat on his stomach with his head down. Johnson initially complied, though Resendez and others continued to order him to stop looking up and put his head down. “Do not fucking move, do you understand?” Resendez said. “You could get shot.”

“Don’t shoot!” Johnson responded.

“Look fucking down then! Do not move! Do not move and do what we say, do you understand?” Resendez yelled. To another officer, Resendez then said, “Hey, he’s thinking about it, dude.” Then, roughly a minute after Johnson got down on the ground, he popped up and tried to reenter the restaurant. Resendez yelled, “Hey!” and immediately fired two shots, hitting Johnson, who began wailing in pain.

Surveillance footage included in the briefing showed Johnson “stand up and attempt to open the door to the restaurant just before the officer shooting,” as Sgt. Brian Bower said in the briefing video. In the extended footage from Resendez’s body-cam released to New Times, one person inside the restaurant suggested to Resendez that a bullet might have entered the restaurant and struck the base of the front counter.

As other officers moved in to render aid to the Johnson, Resendez entered the Burger King to briefly question employees. “Did he have a firearm?” Resendez asked employees in the restaurant’s kitchen. One employee told Resendez that “we are unsure” and that “the whole time, he was trying to grab something from his pocket.” No one found a gun. “The man was found to be unarmed,” Bower said in the briefing.

The shooting is being investigated by DPS’s Major Incidents Division and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will later determine if charges against Resendez are merited. The Phoenix Police Department will also conduct an internal investigation, though no police shooting this year has yet been deemed to have violated department policy or resulted in criminal charges against officers. A police incident report says Johnson was arrested for disorderly conduct.

According to the Phoenix Police Department’s public officer-involved shooting database, Resendez was also among the officers who shot and killed Armando Reyes in July 2023. Reyes, who had been involved in a single-car collision and appeared to be impaired, pointed a gun at officers. That shooting was found to be within department policy, according to police’s public use-of-force database. That database shows eight other use-of-force incidents associated with Resendez’s badge number dating back to 2022, all of which were found to comply with policy. The shooting of Reyes was the only one that involved lethal force.