Pinal County Attorney’s top investigator body-slammed Black teen

The controversial “chief of investigations” for embattled Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller has been hard at work — doing traffic enforcement in Casa Grande and roughing up a Black teenager.

According to court documents, Richard “Hank” Mueller — who is paid nearly $100,000 a year to oversee a small pool of investigators for the county attorney’s office — stopped Rayvion Johnson for allegedly running through a stop sign on his ebike on his way home from school on March 26. Instead of ticketing the teenager, Mueller searched him and body slammed him, allegedly causing injuries to the 18-year-old’s arms, legs and head. Mueller then arrested Johnson, who spent the night in county jail.

Soon after, all criminal charges were dropped.

Miller hired Mueller in January 2025 to be his chief of investigations, despite a track record of concerning behavior. As Phoenix New Times has previously reported, that includes a drunken bar fight in 2012 that landed him on the Pinal County Attorney’s Office Brady list of shady cops and got him canned from his gig as a deputy for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office. Lowlights from Mueller’s subsequent stints at small Arizona cop shops involve shooting a fleeing suspect and busting into an elderly, disabled man’s home on a false warrant with other police, who Tased and beat the man and then arrested him on bogus charges.

Mueller’s new gig theoretically should have kept him out of any scenarios in which he could knock somebody around. Normally, the county attorney’s investigators assist prosecutors in preparing cases for trial, not patrolling the mean streets of Casa Grande looking for traffic scofflaws. Yet, for some reason, that’s where Mueller found himself late last month.

In an interview with New Times at his Casa Grande home, Johnson explained that he was riding his electric bike home after taking a test that morning at PPEP TEC High School when Mueller flashed his lights at him from an unmarked vehicle parked nearby. Johnson stopped and Mueller ordered him to the curb with his hands on his head. Johnson said Mueller was wearing a tactical vest with the word “police” on it, but did not otherwise identify himself.

Johnson had taken out his earpods so he could hear Mueller, but they fell out of his hand and he tried to put them in his pocket. That’s when the situation escalated.

“I opened my hand, trying to show him, it’s just my headphones,” Johnson recalled. “He’s telling me to drop it, and before I could even drop it, I was already on the ground. It felt like I was on the ground forever. It was hot.”

According to a probable cause statement submitted to the court, Johnson was “assisted to the prone position” by Mueller, who is nicknamed “Hank the Tank” and resembles a refrigerator with a head on it. Johnson, who is 5-foot-4 and weighs less than 150 pounds, supposedly injured “the Tank” while the slight, skinny teen was lying beneath the bruiser. The probable cause statement claims Mueller “sustained multiple abrasions to the hands and wrists” after he tackled Johnson.

Johnson said Mueller kneed him in the back, putting all his weight onto him. The teenager screamed for help, and people emerged from nearby businesses to watch. The young man asked to speak to Mueller’s supervisor, but Mueller laughed him off. 

“He was like, ‘I’m the chief, so good luck with that,’ or something like that,” Johnson recalled. On the arrest paperwork, Mueller is identified as “Chief H. Mueller.”

Injuries and a night in jail

Mueller’s rough treatment apparently caused injuries to the teen. Johnson and his mom, Alicia Henry, shared several photos of abrasions on Johnson’s arms and head, taken after he was released from custody. 

“You can’t really see it on my leg,” Johnson said. “But my leg was all bruised up. I still feel it. My face was all scraped up and stuff.”

Instead of citing and releasing Johnson for a traffic offense — or just letting him off with a warning — Mueller cuffed Johnson, charging him with lying to a law enforcement officer, “obstructing governmental operations” and resisting arrest. The first two are class 1 misdemeanors and the third is a class 6 felony. 

According to a probable cause statement on file with the court, Johnson’s “lying” allegedly involved Johnson telling Mueller that he was 17, despite turning 18 on Jan. 1. The “obstruction” charge is unexplained, but the charge of resisting arrest arose because, during a pat down, Johnson allegedly “began to tense his arms and attempt to pull his hands away, which were controlled by the officer behind his head.”

Johnson, who has no prior arrest record according to the charging documents, was transported by Casa Grande police to its offices and later booked into the Pinal County jail in Florence, where he spent the night in a holding tank. (A spokesperson for the Casa Grande Police Department told New Times that the agency was not involved in the arrest, but responded to the scene because Mueller “didn’t have the means to transport the person” — likely because Mueller’s vehicle had no secured cage for arrestees, as is standard in police vehicles.)

Johnson’s phone had been confiscated, and he didn’t have his mom’s cell phone memorized, so he couldn’t call her. Henry said that Mueller and some other law enforcement officers returned her son’s bike and backpack to her early that afternoon — while, Johnson believes, he was still at a nearby Casa Grande police station. Johnson thinks the cops were “milking” the situation so that he had to spend a night in a dirty holding cell with about 11 other prisoners and no bed, calling it “a traumatic experience.”

A judge eventually released Johnson on his own recognizance. A March 31 message in the court file from the county attorney’s office stated that “charges have been declined,” though Johnson told New Times that he believes he still has a court date on April 10.

Johnson said he is still frightened after the ordeal. His mom is worried because she believes she’s seen Mueller ride by their home a couple of times after her son was set free. Both believe Johnson was profiled by Mueller, who is white.

“I think it was racial discrimination because when he stopped me, I felt like he was just trying to look for a gun or something, trying to see if I had some drugs or something,” Johnson said. He added that when he asked why Mueller couldn’t just give him a warning, Mueller replied, “You think I want to be doing this? I’m looking for people with warrants and stuff like that. I’m not looking for people passing stop signs.”

Vanilla ICE

Asked about Mueller’s arrest of Johnson, Miller’s office emailed New Times a blustery statement.

“Over the past decade, PCAO has participated in successful multi-jurisdictional, multi-task force operations,” it read. “Yet when our officers were doing the heavy lifting to keep our community safe, Stephen Lemons and the Phoenix New Times were nowhere to be found. They did not cover the many successes over the past year or the bravery of the men and women from PCAO, including this investigator. Now, however, Lemons has suddenly surfaced to run coordinated hit pieces against law enforcement. It is the height of hypocrisy to ignore large, successful operations that remove predators from our neighborhoods, only to turn around and cherry-pick one isolated moment to push an anti-law enforcement narrative.” 

And yet, that last sentence seems to acknowledge that Mueller’s arrest of Johnson was a screw-up. Certainly, there is nothing courageous about Mueller’s apparent manhandling of a much smaller individual who is quite obviously no threat to anyone. That’s bullying, not “bravery.”

Kent Volkmer, who served as Pinal County Attorney before Miller defeated him in the 2024 GOP primary, called Miller’s use of his agency’s investigators to perform ordinary police functions “a waste of limited resources.” Volkmer added that the investigators he hired would make an arrest only if “they had no choice but to take that person into custody at this time for the safety of everyone around them.” The office’s investigators “are there to help us with the currently existing cases, not to develop and build new cases.” If there’s a law enforcement issue in the community, he said, “the best way to deal with it” is by going to the county’s sheriff and police chiefs.

“But obviously Mr. Miller has a different take than me,” Volkmer said, pointing to Miller’s decision to strike a wildcat cooperation deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which the county board of supervisors says was illegal. Mueller also serves as the county attorney’s law enforcement liaison with ICE pursuant to that agreement.

Additionally, police reports obtained from the Apache Junction Police Department show that in late 2025, Miller’s office “led” a task force of several local agencies, which set up sex trafficking stings by engaging with men online who were allegedly looking to purchase sex from underage girls. According to various sources, most of the heavy lifting was done by the local cop shops, though Miller’s office supposedly issued a “challenge coin” to commemorate the event. 

The county attorney’s office has not answered New Times’ questions about whether the Brady-listed Mueller was involved in these activities, or if Miller’s investigators’ crossing into regular police work creates a conflict of interest for the county attorney’s office, which is responsible for prosecuting such cases.

Regardless, Miller seems unconcerned by appearances. Earlier this year, allegations of sex discrimination by his office and accusations that he and his staff have used encrypted apps to get around state public records law triggered a complaint by the Pinal County Board of Supervisors to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

The Pinal County supervisors and Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple are suing Miller over his agreement with ICE, which has been preliminarily enjoined. The suit has since been moved to Maricopa County Superior Court. The supervisors and the sheriff, who are Republicans like Miller, argue that Miller acted without the supervisors’ consent and that the ICE contract increases the county’s potential liability — in part due to possible future allegations of racial discrimination.