First of two parts For one young Phoenix police officer, the Taser X26 he was carrying on April 23, 2006, was a godsend — both for him and the man who said he wanted to die. Kevin Sakalas already was a fan of stun guns, of which Taser International is,…
In response to a series of public records requests, the Phoenix Police Department provided New Times with 42 reports from April 2006 in which its officers deployed a Taser stun gun. A majority of the incidents stemmed from domestic-violence situations involving mentally disturbed men. In fact, all those Tased that…
Continental Airlines Flight 82 departed from Newark, New Jersey, on the evening of March 30, bound for New Delhi, India. One of the 300-plus passengers on the Boeing 777 jetliner attracted little attention as he boarded and settled quietly into a window seat in an emergency-exit row. He was 32-year-old…
Robert “Gypsy” Comer, whose path to death by lethal injection was paved with bad intentions, sent a series of letters to New Times before his execution on the morning of Tuesday, May 22. “I’m ready, and I’ve been ready,” he wrote from his cell in Florence on April 29, “though…
For a two-month stretch that ended a few weeks ago, Mistress Seven spent her evenings as the guest of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City, the primitive outdoor jail in south Phoenix. She did so under her legal name of Amber Dawn Landin, 32, serving time for extreme DUI and felony…
If attorney Steve Dichter could have gotten away with kicking his client Bob Owens to shut him up at the con man’s recent sentencing, he probably would have. After years of police investigation, news stories (starting with New Times’ “Catch Him If You Can,” August 12, 2004), a grand jury…
The lawyers are scurrying inside the Juvenile Court building in Mesa on a recent morning like shoppers on a last-minute run. They move from the appointment counter toward their courtrooms, lugging briefcases and working BlackBerries, faces scrunched up in multitasking concentration. Small groups are milling outside the eight courtrooms, waiting…
On the morning of April 5, a pale and paunchy middle-aged man wearing a black-and-white-striped jail outfit stood before county Judge Brian Ishikawa. The courtroom was empty but for court personnel, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, the case investigator, a reporter, and Robert Shawn Owens, who was the pasty-faced guy…
Steve Bison of Alabama’s Cherokee River Indian Community says the war over 4-year-old Raven Laws may be traced back to the legendary Battle of Horseshoe Bend. “It’s a long story,” he says. Fought during the War of 1812, it pitted soldiers under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson and their…
Shortly before the 2004 presidential election, Dale Schwartz decided to register to vote. “It was a big election, and everyone was stressing how important it was,” says Schwartz, a Phoenix resident. “Honestly, I just had had enough of Bush.” Alas, the bill collector, now 55, didn’t get his way, as…
On the early evening of April 7, 2004, an Apache Junction resident named Ruby Norman shot an e-mail over to Sheriff Joe Arpaio that must have seemed heaven-sent. “I need to talk to you about a matter that would be of great interest to you,” Norman wrote to Arpaio, then…
Some time ago, New Times got a letter from an inmate in Florence named James Stites, who is serving a six-year prison sentence for attempting to molest a child. Stites was writing about his cellmate at the time, the infamous diddling doctor Brian Finkel, who was sentenced in January 2004…
It’s been two years since the city of Phoenix’s chief financial officer jumped to his death from atop his moving Mercedes on East Camelback Road. To this day, mention of 55-year-old Kevin Keogh’s highly publicized leap on the afternoon of December 8, 2004, raises the question, “What could that poor…
“You know, prison and the death penalty, they may not deter a guy from a life of crime,” Robert Comer writes, “but I promise you this. Sentence a guy to one year of dealing with anti-death penalty fanatics and the courts will cause a guy to turn over a new…
Barney Mullen is a man of few words, but many kind gestures. For almost three decades, Mullen has been going about his business at the Denny’s restaurant at Seventh Street and Camelback Road. His job isn’t fancy: Day in and day out since 1978 (that’s 28 years and counting), Barney…
James Mullins is talking for the first time publicly about why he confessed — falsely — to killing a 19-year-old woman in Tempe a year ago. His case made headlines for days this summer after Phoenix police revealed a link between the so-called Baseline Killer and the September 2005 shooting…
Last week, a Maricopa County grand jury indicted former Phoenix resident Eric Natzel on two counts of felony child abuse in the brutal August 2005 death of his 2-year-old daughter Abbey. Police in Michigan arrested the 27-year-old Natzel and are holding him in lieu of $500,000 bond at the Lenawee…
The Phoenix homicide detective reaches the crime scene just after 8 p.m. on December 12. A woman has been shot to death behind a warehouse at 40th Street and Southern Avenue, about five minutes by foot from the busy intersection. Her body is splayed on the concrete driveway between the…
When Ann Marie Tate was a little girl, she wrote a story that her mother, three decades later, recalls precisely. Chien Johnson says her daughter described finding a ring on a sidewalk. The ring, Ann Marie told her mom, had magical properties. It could make wishes come true. Ann Marie’s…
During the Arizona State-Arizona series in Tucson a few weeks ago, Arizona Daily Star sports columnist Greg Hansen wrote of ASU’s head baseball coach: “Pat Murphy will win no one’s popularity contest. He’s thoroughly unlikable, but that’s good in the sense of the UA-ASU thing. . . . One thing…
The last morning of Abigail Nicole Lahnan’s short life begins peacefully. It is March 23, 2005, a Wednesday. Abby, who was born at Phoenix Baptist Hospital on November 28, 2003, awakens in her crib across the hall from her parents, Deanna and Patrick. The young family lives in a second-story…
County prosecutors may have to take no for an answer now that a state panel again has rejected their attempts to have a judge sanctioned for accusing them of racial bias in a burglary case involving a black man. For the second time in seven months, the Arizona Commission on…
