Police shot and killed a man in her car. She’s burdened by questions

Danielle Flores sat in the back of the police SUV, handcuffed. She looked through the window. Police cars and their flashing lights overwhelmed her field of vision. The air smelled of burnt rubber. 

Officers had locked her inside just a few minutes earlier. Soon after, she’d heard the squeal of tires. Then gunshots. Lots of gunshots.

Danielle couldn’t see her vintage black Chevrolet Caprice sitting on the frontage road next to the Durango Curve, a stretch of I-17 southwest of downtown Phoenix near Durango Street. It was blocked by the police SUVs, one of which was tethered to the Caprice with a grappling device. She screamed.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be a good outcome with all of the shots that I heard,” she said in an interview with Phoenix New Times nearly two months later.

What had started as a typical Friday night running a few errands had become a disaster. Just after 9 p.m. on Feb. 27, Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers and the Phoenix police officers had shot her partner, 41-year-old Jesus A. Gonzalez Flores, during a traffic stop turned deadly. Jesus had panicked and kept driving when he’d seen DPS’s flashing lights to pull them over, she said. The officers grappled the car, using a tool to stop fleeing vehicles, and brought it to a stop. 

She and Jesus had gotten out — first him, then her. Officers cuffed her and put her in the back of a patrol SUV. But Jesus was never cuffed. Instead, he managed to get back in the tethered car and tried unsuccessfully to drive away. After a standoff — during which time Jesus kept the engine of the hobbled car running — officers shot and killed him in a barrage of bullets.

“I don’t know why he got back up, I don’t know why he got in the car, I don’t know what he thought he would get out of doing that,” the 39-year-old Danielle said of Jesus. “But they had plenty of chances to make an arrest and they didn’t.”

Jesus will never be able to tell her why he didn’t immediately pull over that night. Danielle and her family have only their best guesses. They think he was scared that if he was arrested, he would not have access to his dialysis treatment in jail. He also worried about getting deported because of his immigration status. Jesus was born in Mexico and his parents brought him to the United States as a young child.

Danielle wasn’t charged with any crimes that night and hasn’t heard from DPS or Phoenix police since, she said. She doesn’t know what led the officers to pull them over. 

When asked for comment for this story, Phoenix police directed New Times to DPS, which initiated the stop and was in charge of the investigation. DPS sent a link to its original release about the incident but declined to comment further. New Times also requested the DPS incident report from the shooting but has not received it.

Three months after police shot her partner in her car, Danielle has more questions than answers.

‘I’m not going to let them take me’

Though Danielle calls Jesus her husband, they were never legally married. Their shared last name is a coincidence. They met about a decade ago — seeing that they had a mutual friend on Facebook, he’d sent her a friend request. They chatted, went on a date and “the rest is history,” she said. She affectionately called him “Jesse.”

They’d separated in August, but Jesus was still around a lot. He’d moved back in with his mom in Avondale, but he did his dialysis treatment in her neighborhood just southwest of downtown Phoenix, so he came by often. He also visited her children. He’d been a part of their lives for so long that he was basically their father.

Wearing a Diamondbacks shirt and her hair pulled back into a tight bun, Danielle recounted their relationship on an afternoon in March, sitting on one of the mismatched outdoor chairs in the yard of the house she’d lived in with Jesus. Her 13-year-old daughter and her son’s girlfriend sat on the ground beside her while she replayed the events that fateful night at the Durango Curve, just a five-minute drive away from where they were sitting.

That Friday night, he’d come over to hang out at her home. They’d taken her car to run some errands, she said. He drove because she’d had a couple of drinks. They’d picked up hair dye at the Dollar General for her daughter, who is in middle school and the youngest of three. Then they drove to a dispensary. Just after 9 p.m., they were on their way back home when a state trooper signaled for them to pull over.

How Jesus reacted alarmed Danielle.

“I’m not going to let them take me,” she recalled him saying.

Sitting in the front passenger seat, Danielle immediately tried to convince him to pull over. She told him to listen to the officers and stop the car. She reminded him that she needed to make it home to her children.

“I just kept praying that he just would stop,” she said. “There was no point in us trying to run. There was no point in him trying to run. But I knew he was scared.”

Jesus kept driving. They both took out their phones. Jesus called his mom and Danielle called her oldest son. She told her son where they were and that they were being pulled over but Jesus wouldn’t stop the car. She doesn’t know what Jesus told his mom because they spoke in Spanish and she couldn’t understand them.

Danielle doesn’t remember what else she said to her son. The car was grappled soon after, causing it to fishtail and leading Danielle to drop the phone. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, so she braced against the dashboard, facing Jesus while the car listed back and forth. He tried to keep driving forward. The momentum propelled her into the dashboard, smashing her shoulder, elbow and ankle on the front of the car.

“It just felt like a car wreck,” she said.

Once the car was finally stopped by the grappling device — through no acquiescence on Jesus’ part — Danielle pleaded with him to listen to the officers. He agreed, but with one caveat. 

“I’m not going back,” he said to her before he got out of the car. 

Danielle remained in the car with her hands up, touching the roof. She didn’t want the officers to think she was going for a weapon, she said. As Jesus walked away from the car, she yelled out the window that they were unarmed. The officers ordered him to get on the ground, and he complied. The officers then shouted at her to get out of the car and back up toward them. She got out — leaving behind her phone, wallet and keys — and obeyed their commands. As they cuffed her, Jesus apologized, she said.

Then they took her to a police SUV and locked her inside. 

According to a Phoenix police briefing on the incident, Danielle was being taken into custody when the first Phoenix police officer arrived. Footage from the body cameras of the two Phoenix police officers who fired their weapons at Jesus captured some of what followed. DPS has not released body-cam footage from its troopers related to the incident.

They cuffed Danielle and asked her if anyone else was in the car, and then led her away. However, Jesus had suddenly rushed back into the car and tried to drive away. He revved the engine multiple times before it lurched forward a few feet. The attached police Tahoe lurched forward, too, just as an officer was trying to get into the driver’s seat. The officers on the scene scrambled, trying to move other patrol cars into place to block Jesus in — including one police vehicle for which they briefly couldn’t find the keys. 

For about two minutes, Jesus gunned the engine, smoke from the tires billowing onto the road while the officers maneuvered their Tahoes to block him. An officer yelled for him to show his hands and stop reaching or they’d shoot him. The officer yelled for Jesus to keep his hands on his head. Then the officers fired into the car, one officer’s shot setting off a volley of bullets from several others. 

Jesus’s foot stayed on the gas pedal after he was shot. The engine continued to rev.

‘Is he alive?’

When his mother called, Christian Martinez was finishing up a night of bowling in Scottsdale. He’d taken his girlfriend and her father, who was visiting from out of town. Then the 20-year-old’s phone rang.

“Next thing I know, she’s telling me that Jesse, he’s not stopping. That there was a cop behind them,” Martinez told New Times in a phone interview.

He heard her yelling at Jesus to stop the car. He also shouted for Jesus to stop, but he doesn’t know who heard what. When the phone went silent, his girlfriend quickly looked up Danielle’s exact location with the Life360 app. They got in their car, dropped her dad off at his hotel and drove 20 minutes to the Durango Curve. The road was blocked off and reporters were already setting up when they arrived, he said. He could see his mom’s location right in front of them on the app, but he couldn’t see her or the car.

The reporters asked them if they knew what was happening. He told them he didn’t but that he was looking for his mom. Then he asked them why they were there. The reporters told him they’d been sent because a man wouldn’t stop driving and there had been gunshots.

“Once they told me that there was gunfire, I just felt defeated,” Martinez said. “It’s hard to explain that feeling of, like, helplessness.”

He and his girlfriend asked whether there was a woman at the scene and whether she was OK. No one would acknowledge that she was even there, he said. Around 11 p.m., Martinez and his girlfriend gave up and went home, hoping Danielle would somehow be there when they arrived. She wasn’t.

Danielle, who listened in on the phone interview with Martinez, quietly cried. 

Martinez didn’t know it, but Danielle had been in the back of a police SUV. After she heard the gunshots, she anxiously sat there for a couple of hours. All she could think about was whether or not Jesus was alive. Officers came to take her information and ask if she needed anything. She asked to go to the bathroom and to have her cuffs loosened. They took her to a command truck with a toilet and, when they put the cuffs back on, they cuffed her in the front rather than the back. 

Then they questioned her. Was he known to get into a shootout with the cops? No, she said. She had questions for them as well. “I kept asking, ‘Is he OK? Is he alive?’” she recalled. No one would tell her anything. 

She was never charged with a crime. Two detectives drove her home, she said. She doesn’t know their names or which department they were with. They didn’t give her their cards. She asked if Jesus had died.

“They said yes,” Danielle recalled. 

That confirmed her fears. She’d heard so many shots, she didn’t know how he could have possibly survived.

Danielle got home around midnight. She didn’t have her keys, so she knocked. Martinez and his girlfriend answered the door, dragging her inside. She recounted what happened, and they all cried — waking her youngest daughter, who came downstairs to ask what had happened. No one slept again until 3 or 4 in the morning. But then at 6, they were awoken by the arrival of Jesus’s mom. She’d been notified about his killing and had driven straight over. 

Danielle said she hasn’t heard anything about Jesus’ death since officers dropped her off that night. She called a number on a business card that officers gave Jesus’ mom, but she didn’t hear back.

“It’s kind of like I didn’t exist there. But you can see me in the body cam, like you can see me getting put in handcuffs,” Danielle said. “I was there. I witnessed everything but they never told me anything. Nobody’s reached out, nobody’s called me since.”

Jesus was shot so many times that there was no chance of having an open-casket funeral. He was cremated instead. Her car was released to her in April, she said. She’s been fixing it up slowly. 

She read in the news that they found a machete in the back of it — one of the more specific details from the incident released by the two departments, though neither alleged that Jesus had wielded it. Danielle said they kept the machete around to chop wood for the bonfires they have in an old rusted barbecue that sits outside her home. She pointed to a piece of wood resting on the barbecue. “That’s probably one of the pieces that he chopped,” she said. She doesn’t know why the machete was in the car.

“It just happened to be there. But that had nothing to do with him brandishing it or nothing like that,” she said. “It wouldn’t have even been reachable from the front seat.” 

Danielle’s daughter now keeps a sticker of Jesus inside her phone case. It features a photo of Jesus in front of the black Caprice in which he made his final, unexplainable stand. Jesus loved that car, Danielle said. It was listed in her name, but they’d bought it together — all original from 1982, including the interior, except for the paint.