The victim, 36-year-old Efrain Hidalgo, was the sixth person killed by Phoenix police this year. A seventh has died since then. Last year, Phoenix officers shot and killed 14 people, an increase from 12 in 2023 and 10 in 2022.
If the circumstances of Hidalgo’s death sound familiar, that might be because a similar bike light stop resulted in the death of Sergio Alvarez last year. Police targeted Alvarez in a pretextual stop, profiling him because he was Latino and supposedly near a known drug house and then using his lack of a bike light as an excuse to detain him. After being tackled by officers, Alvarez allegedly shot one in the leg before being killed by the other, though much about the incident was not captured by police body-worn camera footage.
More of what happened in Hidalgo’s killing was captured, although it raises questions of its own. The footage showed that police did not command Hidalgo to drop the knife before firing at him multiple times and also showed that police waited several minutes to provide medical aid as Hidalgo lay motionless on the ground. Police also waited six minutes to provide aid to another man they shot and killed last month.
Body-worn camera footage from the shooting was released as part of a “critical incident briefing” video created by Phoenix police. The department’s briefings are narrated by officers and made public after any police shooting or in-custody death. In addition to body camera footage, they typically include a limited selection of dispatch audio or surveillance footage from nearby businesses. However, the footage typically does not show what happened after the shooting occurred.
Additional footage provided to Phoenix New Times in a records request shows that officers waited about five minutes to render aid, at one point yelling at Hidalgo to “roll away from the knife” before he could be helped. Hidalgo was pronounced dead at the hospital 40 minutes after being shot, though one officer wrote in a department incident report that upon providing aid to the 36-year-old at the scene, he had no pulse.
Police have provided no footage of the beginning of the officers’ interaction with Hidalgo, despite the official narrative detailing that officers attempted to stop him on his bike before he peddled away.
The shooting
According to police, Phoenix cops Matthew Olmstead and Matthew Paz were on patrol near Southern Avenue and 20th Street on Aug. 31 when they stopped Hidalgo just after midnight because the bike he was riding didn’t have a headlight. A police report obtained by New Times provides no narrative from either officer's perspective, which might explain if they harbored additional suspicions, as in Alvarez’s case.The officers jumped out of their car, body-cam video shows, and Hidalgo ran a few yards before being tackled by Paz. Then, after Hidalgo allegedly took out a knife, the video shows that Olmstead unleashed a torrent of nine bullets on Hidalgo at close range. It’s unclear how many times Hidalgo was struck, though one officer confirmed in an incident report that he had multiple gunshot wounds.
Body-cam footage showed Olmstead was particularly quick to fire after spotting the knife. After Paz tackled Hidalgo, the two struggled for a few seconds. Then, Hidalgo pulled out a dagger, leading Olmstead to yell, “Hey, hey, hey, hey! What’s in your hand? He’s got a knife!” Immediately after — while Hidalgo was still struggling to his feet and without telling Hidalgo to drop the knife — Olmstead fired nine times from about 10 feet away. After the third shot, Hidalgo fell to the ground.
About 30 seconds later and with a gun fixed on Hidalgo, Olmstead yelled at the unresponsive man to “roll away from the knife. We can help you if you roll away.” No noises or responses could be heard from Hidalgo on the video, though the two officers at one point could be heard saying he was still moving and that the knife was about a foot and a half from one of his hands.
Five minutes passed before several other officers began to provide medical aid. Officer Joseph Corso wrote in his incident report that Hidalgo was “pulseless, apneic, and had fixed/dilated pupils.” Hidalgo was pronounced dead at 1:28 a.m. at a county hospital.
The knife police said they recovered after Efrain Hidalgo's shooting death.
Phoenix Police Department
‘Should still be alive’
In a statement to New Times, the co-director of the police accountability group Poder in Action highlighted the apparently pretextual nature of the stop and condemned Hidalgo’s killing.“Efrain should still be alive,” wrote Ben Laughlin. “Bike riding at night is not a crime. Police should never be stopping people and escalating encounters like this, but especially not for supposed infractions that have no meaningful impact on public safety.
“These officers will say they felt threatened in order to justify killing Efrain. But they were the aggressors at every step of this incident. It was them who needlessly stopped Efrain, it was them who chased him when he fled in fear, it was them who tackled him, and it was them who pulled their weapons and fired on him 9 times simply because of the presence of a knife — the carrying of which is also not illegal.”
Though Paz could be heard telling another officer that Hidalgo swiped the knife at him, the footage is too fuzzy to see clearly if that happened.
Olmstead has worked for the department for two years. The Arizona Department of Public Safety is conducting a criminal investigation into Hidalgo’s death, the conclusions of which will be reviewed by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. The Phoenix Police Department is also running its own internal investigation to determine if the officers’ actions were in line with policy.
