Phoenix police arrested wrong man for 2024 hit-and-run, lawsuit says

On a late Friday evening nearly two years ago, Little Joe Lageman was walking down the sidewalk in his Maryvale neighborhood, headphones in, wearing a dark hoodie and jeans. The 37-year-old had just gotten into an argument with his fiancée at his mother-in-law’s house and decided to take a walk and get some air.

It’s become a ritual of sorts for Lageman — whose legal name is Little Joe — to walk or jog to the nearby Kingdom of Jehovah’s Witnesses church to say a prayer. Though he’s not religious anymore, he used to go with his late grandmother two to three times a week until he turned 13. So, to clear his mind, that’s where he headed.

Lageman was less than half a block away from the church when Phoenix police officer Diego Santana spotted him. Santana was searching for a suspect who’d fled the scene after rear-ending a parked brown Dodge Ram 1500 with dark blue GMC Silverado just down the same block. Lageman insists that hit-and-run suspect wasn’t him, yet his interaction with Santana ended in his arrest at gunpoint and what Lageman says were a chipped tooth and cracked ribs.

For a year, Lageman fought misdemeanor charges for resisting arrest and fleeing the scene of an accident. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges, but the Phoenix Police Department has not admitted it arrested the wrong guy, nor have police zeroed in on any other suspects in the case. 

Lageman is now suing over the incident, claiming that police trampled his civil rights, overzealously focused on him as a suspect and did not do basic police work that would have proved his innocence.

“That day, I felt like I was gonna lose my life,” Lageman said in a sit-down interview with Phoenix New Times earlier this month. “It happened so fast. I was already feeling threatened from the moment he pulled his gun.”

An ‘eerie feeling’

The hit-and-run that precipitated the incident occurred around 7:45 p.m. on March 29, 2024. According to a police incident report, after the accident, the driver of the Silverado got out of his truck and told the owner of the other truck not to call police. He then fled, and the person who called in the incident to police suggested the driver may have had a gun.

Santana arrived on the scene in a police SUV along with his partner, officer Adrian Samaniego. While Samaniego went to talk to the parked car’s owner, Santana hopped in his car to look for the suspect. When he came upon Lageman nearby, Santana exited his vehicle and said, “Sir, I gotta ask you a question. Where are you coming from?” according to body camera footage shared with New Times. 

Lageman raised his hands over his head but expressed his confusion about being stopped. “I’m walking, bro,” he told Santana, before informing the officer that he had a gun on him. Santana then pointed his service weapon at Lageman and told him to put his hands on his head and face away from him. “Why?” Lageman asked. “I’m not doing anything.”

In the incident report from Lageman’s arrest, Santana wrote that because of an “eerie feeling” he had — and the presence of children playing outside, which is not evident from his body-cam footage — he “feared for the public’s safety.” The rest of his interaction with Lageman was tense. 

Santana and other officers who had joined told Lageman to put his hands on his head, which Lageman eventually did while continuing to question the reason for stopping him. The officers then told Lageman to lie prone on the ground, which he again obeyed while arguing with the officers over the stop. He never made a move for his gun, which he told New Times he carried for protection at the time and which was in his waistband.

“For him to just jump the way he did, it threw me off. It threw me 100% off,” Lageman told New Times. “And that’s why I got the way I got, defensively. It’s like, ‘What’s the whole reason for this? If I’m showing (the gun) to you, why are you feeling so threatened?’”

Santana’s narrative in the police report paints a different picture of the interaction than his body-cam footage does. 

The officer wrote that Lageman was “verbally non-compliant” — though, notably, not physically so — and “displayed himself with facial tightening, an intense 1000-yard stare, and a defensive fighting stance.” Though the quality of the body-cam footage is not sharp enough to discern Lageman’s facial expressions, he never assumed a fighting stance. Instead, he spent the entirety of the less-than-three-minute interaction with his hands above or on his head.

The second Lageman was lying on the ground, Santana and two other officers rushed in to handcuff him. Santana’s report claims Lageman tried to “buck me off balance and forcefully attempted to prevent officers from effecting the arrest,” prompting Santana to put his hand “on his head to control his movement.” However, Santana’s body-cam footage does not show Lageman resisting arrest but does show Santana immediately pushing Lageman’s head to the ground. Though Lageman did at one point move his hands as if to push his body up as the officers held him down, the time that passed from Lageman lying on the ground to being successfully handcuffed was only 25 seconds.

As the officers loaded Lageman into the back of a police car, he complained that they had chipped his tooth during the arrest.

“I’ma sue the fuck out of you,” Lageman repeatedly yelled, according to body-cam footage.

“And you’re going to lose,” Santana replied.

Investigative tunnel vision

Both body-cam footage and Santana’s report show that, after Lageman was arrested, he informed the officers that he wasn’t the person they were seeking and that he’d seen another person matching the description earlier. According to the police report, officers were looking for a 25-year-old, 5-foot-8 Hispanic man who weighed 160 pounds. Lageman is Hispanic, but 37 years old and 6-foot-0.

Lageman spent five days in jail, during which he couldn’t breathe as his ribs were cracked in the arrest, Lageman told New Times. After his release, he stayed in bed for three weeks to heal. He never saw a doctor for the cracked ribs because he didn’t have insurance. It’s not clear how he determined the cracked ribs diagnosis.

“I couldn’t breathe in there and I couldn’t get out of bed,” he told New Times. “I couldn’t defend myself. I couldn’t protect myself. Being in there just, it threw me for a whole different ball game.” 

Documents show that Phoenix prosecutors offered Lageman 36 months of probation in exchange for a guilty plea, but Lageman rejected it. The charges hung over him for more than a year. In April 2025, prosecutors dropped them due to a lack of a reasonable likelihood of conviction, according to Lageman’s attorney, Sean Woods.

In an email, Phoenix police spokesperson Sgt. Rob Scherer told New Times that no other suspects were arrested in the hit-and-run incident and “no other suspects are being sought.” The department declined to comment further, citing the pending litigation. The spokesperson for the city prosecutor’s office declined to comment on whether any other suspects were investigated or arrested.

Lageman’s lawsuit alleges they weren’t, and that the cops who arrested him failed to do basic follow-up work to confirm his connection to the hit-and-run. For instance, the police report contains registration information for the Silverado that Lageman was allegedly driving — it was not registered to Lageman — but the incident report does not show that the officers questioned the vehicle’s owner.

Lageman has a gold Ford Truck that doesn’t match the vehicle description at the scene, he told New Times.

“They knew the vehicle. They had all the information about the owner of the vehicle and where the vehicle was registered,” the lawsuit states. “Instead of pulling that information — which would have given them the information for the person who actually committed the hit and run — Santana decided to throw caution to the wind.” 

Nor does the incident report show that police searched the vehicle for fingerprints, given that Lageman’s would presumably have been all over it. Body-cam video shows one officer suggested swabbing the steering wheel for DNA, but the idea was dismissed by other officers, who asserted that Lageman was the man driving the car. The same officer attempted to use Lageman’s car key to start the Silverado, without success.

The incident report says that the victim identified Lageman in a “one on one identification process,” a process that is much less reliable than asking a victim to pick a suspect from a lineup. Body-cam footage shows the man did appear to say he recognized Lageman from the crash, though he’d previously told an officer “not really” when asked if he got a good look at the person who hit his car. He also previously described the suspect as wearing a white shirt, which Lageman was not.

During Lageman’s criminal proceedings, his criminal attorney hired a private investigator who spoke with the owner of the Silverado that caused the hit-and-run. Woods, who is representing Lageman in the civil suit, said the vehicle’s owner confirmed that she has two sons who could have driven the car that night, both of whom have previously faced a mix of county and federal charges. Lageman’s lawsuits named those alternate subjects, though New Times is withholding their names because they have not been formally accused of wrongdoing.

Lasting effects

Fighting the charges took a toll on his life, Lageman says. He lost a manufacturing job because he frequently had to skip work to make court dates. “I was taking off too much time,” he told New Times. “Then after that, it was hard for me to get another job.” He also said members of his family initially didn’t believe he was innocent, leading to conflict and worsening his stress.

“For the longest time, none of my family believed me that I didn’t do nothing, so it just caused a lot of fights,” he told New Times. “Me having to deal with that court for a whole year was bringing doubts to them.”

Lageman’s lawsuit says he “tried committing suicide as a result of the trauma from this incident,” was “diagnosed with PTSD” and “voluntarily admitted himself to a psych unit after calling the suicide helpline and being told they were sending police to check on him.” Lageman did not want to discuss those subjects in his interview with New Times.

In October, Lageman’s attorney sent a notice of claim to the city of Phoenix, offering to settle his claim for $1.25 million. The city declined. Lageman is now suing over excessive force and violations of his Fourth and 14th Amendment rights. Santana has been involved in 17 use-of-force incidents in the last five years, according to police records, all of which were found to be within the department’s policy.

“The city of Phoenix has had a history of responding to suspects in an excessive manner,” said Woods, referencing the Department of Justice’s damning 2024 report on the constitutional violations regularly committed by Phoenix cops. “When we bring a lawsuit like this, not only do we try to get some justice and maybe some finality and closure for my clients, like Little Joe, but we also want to affect some sort of change.”