13 March 16th–March 22nd, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | cONTeNTs | feeDBacK | OPiNiON | NeWs | feaTuRe | NighT+Day | culTuRe | film | cafe | music | apprehend Harris and his friends until after they drove away. But police never alerted the group to their presence or gave them a chance to pull over. Instead, officers escalated directly to a high-risk maneuver that forced the car to a stop. That’s when Harris ran out and was shot. Despite these issues, Phoenix police investigated Bertz and determined that he acted in accordance with department policy in killing Harris. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prose- cute, stating that Bertz did not “commit any act that warrants criminal prosecution.” Instead, prosecutors decided to hold Harris’s three friends responsible for his death. Arizona’s “felony murder” law allows people to be charged with murder if someone dies during the commission of a felony, even if they did not cause the death. Jeremiah Triplett, Sariah Busani, and Johnny Reed — ages 20, 19, and 14 at the time — were in the car with Harris on the night of his death. The county attorney’s office charged them with first-degree murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, and burglary. Busani and Triplett were held in jail on a $1 million bond for three years before finally being sentenced in the first few months of 2022. Busani was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Triplett was sentenced to 30 years. Reed was held on a $500,000 bond and was ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison — more years than he had even been alive at the time of his arrest. “You guys are taking my 14-year-old baby and signing his whole life off,” Reed’s aunt, Shawanna Chambers, said in an interview with The Appeal. Chambers raised Reed and his younger brother since they were babies. “He’s a young Black boy. And we’re in poverty,” Chambers said. “They were never going to hold the police accountable for Jacob’s murder. It was going to be us.” Reed, who was in his first year of high school at the time of his arrest, has been incarcerated with adults for the last four years because of the seriousness of the charges against him, Chambers said. According to his aunt, he has spent some of that time in solitary confinement in an attempt to separate him from the rest of the prison population because of his age. For the last year, Reed’s family has been unable to talk to him except through email. Chambers said she applied to visit in person, but the department of corrections told her they never received her application. The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry did not respond when contacted for this story. “I honestly want people to know we made a mistake, but that should never define who our characters are,” said Reed in an email. “We ain’t kill Jacob, we watched Jacob die before our eyes, that was our friend.” Prison has been a painful adjustment, Reed said. “I’ve had to overcome depres- sion and all kinds of things. I’ve been locked up in Solitary Confinement a few times, and that takes a whole different toll on your conscience,” he said. “I really miss my family.” Allowing a Robbery to Happen Reed didn’t know police were watching him on the afternoon of January 10, 2019 as he stood outside his grandmother’s house with a group of friends. It was a warm, dry day in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb where the temperature rarely dips below 40 degrees. Reed was wearing navy jeans and a blue polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He had just finished the eighth grade the year before, but he’d grown lanky — already 5 feet 7 inches and very slight, just over 100 pounds. Police officers in unmarked vehicles snapped photos of Reed and his friends in front of the graying stucco walls of the Crystal Springs apartment complex. Ten thousand feet above him, a Phoenix police officer in a small airplane watched as the 14-year-old posed with an airsoft gun. Reed had been spending a lot of time at his grandmother’s house after she was diagnosed with kidney failure. Reed was her first grandchild, and when she got sick, Reed would “never let her lift a finger,” Chambers said. His sweet and charming tendencies earned him the nickname “Butter” from his grandmother. It was a fitting term of endearment for a teenage boy who loved to bake. Chambers laughed over the phone as she recalled the many nights Reed and his brother spent in the kitchen, baking cookies and cakes. “I’d go to Goodwill and buy all this stuff that you could bake with,” Chambers said. “He couldn’t wait to get home and use them.” To Chambers, Reed was a smart, easy- going kid who loved going to school and playing sports and had a positive influence on the people around him. “I want him home,” Chambers said over the phone, her voice breaking as she discussed what it had been like to see the child she had raised imprisoned for the last four years — with at least eight more to go. “We need him. They threw him away, he doesn’t mean anything to them. He means so much to us,” she said through tears. Police were watching Reed and his friends because they believed that at least one of them — Triplett — was involved in a string of armed robberies that had taken place at fast food restaurants and conve- nience stores across the county over the previous two months. As is standard procedure in robbery investigations, Detective Jacob Rasmussen reviewed armed robbery reports, looking for patterns. Eventually he strung together several reports involving young Black males of similar builds, with hoodies cinched up around their faces. According to Rasmussen, these robberies often occurred at places like Whataburger fast food restaurants and Circle K convenience stores, and they often involved suspects who brandished a gun and took money from the cash register. Sometimes they took cigarettes. Some reports mentioned a red or maroon vehicle. But police didn’t have names or license plates. Rasmussen asked other police depart- ments in Maricopa County to look for similar robbery cases. On January 9, 2019, the Glendale Police Department passed one along. Four months earlier, Triplett had been arrested in connection with two robberies at Circle Ks. A Glendale patrol officer spotted Triplett in the parking lot of another Circle K on September 8, 2018, and recognized him from surveillance footage of the robberies that had occurred two days prior. Triplett left the parking lot driving a car with expired plates. Police pulled Triplett over and found Newport cigarettes and a bottle of Hennessy liquor in the car, the same items taken in the recent robbery. Triplett was arrested and pleaded guilty to solicitation of robbery. He was ordered to pay restitution and sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years of probation. The Glendale police report shows why Phoenix police thought Triplett might be connected to the string of robberies Rasmussen had identified. But the thou- sands of pages of records The Appeal reviewed for this story do not explicitly state why surveillance began, or who, if anyone, police surveilled besides Triplett. Neither Phoenix police nor Rasmussen responded when asked why they started surveilling the group on January 10. Despite having at least nine police reports and surveillance videos of similar robberies, some of which involved a red or maroon SUV, police say they had no choice but to watch a robbery unfold in order to make an arrest. A decision was made “to allow a robbery to happen,” Bertz said during a 2021 deposition for the civil case Roland Harris filed against the city. “That planning aspect was deemed, to my understanding, based on the fact that we did not have probable cause or sufficient evidence at the moment before the robbery to effect an actual arrest.” Two other officers also said in deposi- tions that the police department’s plan that evening was to allow a robbery to occur because “the investigators felt they didn’t have enough probable cause to make an arrest” for any of the more than two dozen prior robberies police believed the group had been involved in. But during the 12 hours police spent surveilling Triplett and others, officers witnessed multiple crimes take place long before the group robbed a Whataburger. Police saw Triplett, who they knew already had a felony conviction, in possession of a gun — an offense he was later charged with. They saw Reed, a child, in possession of what they believed at the time was a deadly weapon. (It was an airsoft gun.) And they saw Triplett, who police knew was just 20 years old, drinking alcohol. Police surveillance photos of Triplett show a tall young man with dark hair and the begin- nings of a beard. He was wearing a black, long-sleeve Champion shirt and a gold chain when officers secretly photographed him outside his mother’s house. There were plenty of other opportuni- ties to make an arrest, said Triplett’s mother, Theresa Greene. She lived in the same apartment complex as Reed’s grand- mother. “I don’t know what was going through their heads, but now it’s cost a person their life.” Instead, just after midnight on January 11, police watched and waited as a 14-year- old boy crawled through the drive-thru window of a burger restaurant and bran- dished an airsoft gun at the employees inside. Jacob from p 11 Johnny Reed and his aunt, Shawanna Chambers, celebrating his eighth grade graduation. >> p 14 Shawanna Chambers
