A BARRAGE OF BULLETS D anielle 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 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 unsuc- cessfully 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 immi- gration 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 orig- inal 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. More than 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 affec- tionately 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 after- noon 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. Police shot and killed a man in her car. She’s burdened by questions. BY CLARISSA SOSIN
