“It just felt like a car wreck,” she said. Once the car was finally stopped by the grappling device — through no acqui- escence 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 girl- friend 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 girl- friend 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 bath- room 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 hand- cuffs,” 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. Around her neck, Danielle now wears a gold charm of the patron saint of hope- less causes. She confides her worries and troubles in St. Jude, to whom Jesus intro- duced her, she said. She wants justice for Jesus, but she doesn’t know what that looks like or if it’s even possible. He should have pulled over, of course. But he also didn’t need to die like that. “They had so much time to get him while he was on the ground. They had so much time to get him while he was standing there, and they failed,” she said. “They failed to arrest him, and instead, they just shoot him like an animal.” Danielle and Jesus Flores. (Provided by Danielle Flores) A sticker made to memorializeJesus Flores. (Provided by Danielle Flores)
