Phoenix Police Department
Audio By Carbonatix
In the early morning of April 27, Phoenix police officer Samuel Painter shot 24-year-old Dalia Moroyoqui after a 911 caller reported that she was walking in the middle of the road with a knife and had swung it at his car. She survived.
The Phoenix Police Department released its “critical incident briefing” on the shooting earlier this week. The briefing consists of a video and an accompanying write-up, and includes audio from a 911 call and footage from two officers’ body-worn cameras. The department releases the briefings approximately two weeks after a critical incident, including non-fatal officer-involved shootings.
Phoenix New Times received longer versions of the 911 call audio and body-cam footage through a public records request. The five-minute-long audio file and nearly 30 minutes of accompanying footage paint a fuller picture of what happened near 4000 East Indian School Road that night.
The shooting
Just after 1 a.m., a man called 911 to report that he’d encountered a woman with a knife standing in the middle of the road at Indian School Road and 40th Street as he was driving home. He told the dispatcher that she had a knife and a flashlight. He’d tried to ask her if she was OK, he said, “but she tried to stab my truck, so I took off on her.”
The caller said the knife was pretty big — bigger than his hand. He gave a physical description and said cars were swerving around her. “She’s going to get fucking hit if she’s standing like that,” he said.
Phoenix police officers Samuel Painter and Nathan Fiorini were among the officers who responded to the call. They both turned on their body cameras just seconds before they exited their patrol vehicle.
“Drop everything that is in your hand,” Painter yelled as he got out of the car, according to body-cam footage. Moroyoqui is not immediately visible in Painter’s body camera footage, but can be seen in Fiorini’s standing further down the street on the road’s center line. Fiorini ordered her to go to the north side of the road but then noticed a man walking nearby.
“Let’s pull up. Keep an eye on her. I don’t want her going towards that guy,” he said.
The officers returned to their car and drove further up the block, hopping back out a few seconds later. Moroyoqui, who was still further down the street, had walked away from the center line and was headed toward the sidewalk. The officers ran towards her, closing the distance but keeping the road’s width between them. They ordered her to get on the ground, noting to each other that she had a knife. Moroyoqui kept walking down the sidewalk away from them.
Body-cam footage does not show her making any threatening movements with the knife nor any motion towards the officers.
“I’m going to hit her,” Fiorini said to Painter. He then fired one foam baton projectile out of his less-lethal launcher. She kept walking.
“Let me get over there. She’s not making it over there. She’s going into a property,” yelled Painter as he ran to the other side of Fiorini. Moroyoqui, who’d continued walking silently down the sidewalk, was about to walk past a driveway.
“Ma’am, we want to help you, but you need to get on the ground,” Fiorini yelled after her as she started to walk past the driveway.
Then Painter fired three live rounds at Moroyoqui, the bullet shells ricocheting across the body camera frame. He shot her about a minute into the encounter.
Jasmine Spearing-Bowen/Cronkite News
The aftermath
Moroyoqui, whom Painter shot after she had passed the driveway without turning to enter it, screamed and doubled over. Without moving toward her, the officers again yelled at her to drop the knife.
“You shot me! You shot me!” she screamed on repeat through sobs, while she sat on the sidewalk. These are her first audible words in the footage.
“Yes,” Painter said in response. “Occupied structure right there.”
“I’m shot! He shot me! He shot me!” she repeated. “Emergency! Emergency! Please help me! I’m shot!”
The officers didn’t approach, continuing to yell at her to drop the knife.
“Why’d you shoot her?” a bystander’s voice can be heard yelling.
“That was so painful,” said Moroyoqui, no longer screaming.
The officers told her to move away from the knife.
“I can’t,” she replied quietly. For the next few minutes, the officers ordered her to move away from the knife so they could help her, while Moroyoqui kept quietly responding that she couldn’t.
As they stood there trying to get her to move away from the knife, an off-camera bystander yelled at the officers that Moroyoqui had been walking away from them.
“You still shoot her?” the bystander yelled.
Painter pointed his rifle light at the knife for Fiorini and other officers. The knife was in front of Moroyoqui, who was now sitting so silently that one of the officers asked the others if she was responsive.
“I’m responsive,” she said.
About five minutes after Painter shot Moroyoqui, the officers decided to approach. Multiple officers rushed her and grabbed her. The body camera footage of the arrest is chaotic. Moroyoqui was on the ground with the officers around her, but between camera movement, blocked lenses and blurred faces to protect identities, not much is visible.
“You’re hurting me!” she screamed.
“We’re trying to help you! Stop!” officers yelled back.
After they cuffed her, Moroyoqui began to babble. “I want to go home,” she said over and over again as the officers examined her. Officers called the fire department to come treat her, and while they stood around her, Moroyoqui repeated that she wanted to go home and that she didn’t need to go to the hospital. She told them multiple times that they could take her stuff if they wanted to — just not her new pen, please — but that she really just wanted to go home.
While the rest of the first responders arrived, Painter and Fiorini were pulled aside to speak separately with officers about the encounter. Then they turned off their cameras.
Clarissa Sosin
What’s next
Moroyoqui is the third person to survive being shot by Phoenix police officers this year. She was arrested and charged in Maricopa Superior Court with disorderly conduct and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Phoenix police officers have shot and killed six people this year, including three within a few days of each other in March. The department killed 11 people last year, down from the previous two years. That’s also significantly down from a high in 2018, when Phoenix cops killed nearly twice as many people, the most by any department in the country that year. However, 11 shooting deaths is still higher than many similarly-sized departments.
The shooting is being investigated by the Major Incidents Division of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will ultimately decide whether criminal charges will be brought against the officers.
It’s also subject to an internal review by the Phoenix Police Department. Phoenix police’s policy on the use of deadly force says it is justified only when a “suspect is acting or threatening to cause death or serious physical injury to the employee or others,” and has the opportunity and “the means or instrumentalities to do so.” It also requires that de-escalation tactics “have been tried, have failed, or are determined to have not been feasible,” and that suspects be given “a reasonable opportunity to comply voluntarily.”
Internal Phoenix police investigators will consider this policy in their review of how the incident between Moroyoqui and the officers unfolded in the footage described above.
Painter, the officer who shot Moroyoqui, was identified by the department in a press release about the incident. The department’s online use-of-force databases show that Painter was investigated for 12 use-of-force incidents between January 2018 and April 1 of this year. The suspects in those incidents were all unarmed and Painter did not use his firearm. All of the incidents were found to be within department policy.
Fiorini, whose name the department did not include in its press release but who identified himself to officers in the body camera footage, also appeared in the use-of-force databases, with 12 incidents between the same dates, some of which overlap with Painter’s. None of those suspects was armed and Fiorini did not use his firearm or impact weapon. All of the incidents were found to be within department policy.
The department did not release the names of the other officers on the scene.
