M aria Alvarez’s home was abuzz with activity. Generations of family members milled around the front yard of her Guadalupe house one breezy February day, drinking sodas and picking at a Little Caesars pizza on a folding table. In the driveway, toddlers rollicked, driving miniature electric cars and intermittently howling. These were Maria’s great-grandchildren, and whenever they got out of hand, the 73-year-old reined them in with a great-grandmotherly admonishment. “Go talk to Tata Sergio,” she said in a stern but loving voice. “He don’t like you behaving that way.” The tata in question was Maria’s son, and he wasn’t there — at least not physically. But Sergio Alvarez’s presence hung over the gath- ering. Maria had directed the rambunctious tots to two nearby poster boards, each plas- tered with photos of Sergio over the years. More were to be found on the table, in photo- books and journals documenting his life. Sergio’s premature death left the Alvarez family, including his six children, with count- less questions about his demise. On May 28, 2024, roughly nine months before the get-together in Guadalupe, a Phoenix police officer had shot and killed Sergio in a late-night encounter that remains shrouded in mystery. Publicly, police said they stopped Alvarez over a bicycle light infraction. But police records show police used the bike light as pretext to stop Alvarez because he was riding his bike near “a drug house.” The stop ended with three bullets tearing through the 48-year-old’s body. In between, police said Sergio managed to shoot an officer despite being pinned to the ground by two cops. How that happened is not clear. The body- worn cameras carried by both cops fell off during the encounter. As a result, footage of the incident released by the department captures almost nothing — just audio from the struggle. The department’s video briefing does not include footage indicating how the stop escalated. Now, a full year after Sergio’s death, his loved ones remain tormented by all they don’t know about his final hour. Reports and records they’ve obtained from police provide few satisfying answers. The one snippet of his final moments that the family has actually recovered — nearby security camera footage from after the shooting, which shows officers kicking the thrice-shot Alvarez and waiting several minutes to render life-saving aid — has only sharpened the family’s grief. Because the police narrative is that Sergio shot first, his family members said, lawyers have declined to help them build a case against the department. Instead, like so many families who have lost loved ones to Phoenix cops and their service weapons — and there are an alarming number of them — they are left mostly with the weight of their unimagi- nable loss, an open wound that may never fully close. “I don’t know why, why, why. They could have just hit him in the leg or the arm,” Maria cried, holding back tears and thinking of the rowdy children in the driveway. “He’s missing his grandbabies. He should be here.” Checkered past, new start The bicycle Sergio was riding that night was a common and welcome sight around Guadalupe, a town south of Phoenix of 5,000 predominantly Latino and Yaqui residents. Just like norteño music and the starch-white Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, Sergio and his bike were a fixture of the dry, dusty community, where the median household income is about 25% lower than that of Phoenix. “He used to cruise around with his bike, back and forth,” said Jose Tavena, who lives down the street from Maria. “He would come over and pull over and say hello to everybody, shake everybody’s hands.” A calm, large man with a soothing baritone voice, Tavena has been in the neighborhood long enough to remember Sergio’s childhood. As a kid, Sergio was charged up with energy, playing baseball and running around town. As an adult, Tavena and others said, Sergio was thoughtful and eager to please. A neighborhood stroll with Sergio could take ages, there were so many people he stopped to greet. “It’d take a long time to get down the street,” said Chrissy Gutierrez, Sergio’s high school sweetheart and the mother of his children. Frequently, he’d offer more than just a hello. “He’d say, ‘You guys need some more beer?’ and would go to the store and bring a 12-pack,” Tavena said. “Sometimes he would bring meat or steaks for us to grill.” Renee Alvarez, who married into the family and lives in Guadalupe, said Sergio would “always make sure somebody had something before he did. Even somebody that would be laying in the street. I’d see him go to the store, buy him some food, make sure he’s up.” Generous and kind as he was, Sergio “had his own struggles,” his 28-year-old daughter Destiny said. His run-in with the cops last year was hardly his first. Court documents from a 2015 case note that Alvarez had been arrested at least eight times, most often for marijuana possession and resisting arrest. In 2010, he and Chrissy got in a heated argument that led to a 911 call for domestic violence, though Chrissy told officers he had not harmed her. Alvarez fled the house and threw a bag of weed on the roof, which offi- cers found. He was ultimately sentenced to a year in prison for the drugs. In 2015, Sergio was charged with trespassing and aggravated assault for allegedly beating up a woman, landing probation and paying restitution. A year later, he was booked for a DUI while driving a child younger than 15. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than three and a half years in prison. The DUI was Sergio’s last run-in with the law before his death. Since he was released early in 2019, he had been motivated to stay out of trouble and “do everything right for us,” Destiny said. Prison and the separation from his family had been rough. “He did not want to go back,” Destiny said. After he got out, she noticed a change in her father’s demeanor. “He was just present. He’d take the time to know where we were mentally and emotion- ally and where we wanted to be in life,” Destiny said. “He asked a lot of questions that made me know he was working to be a better person.” Sergio was interested in Yaqui mythology and believed in a higher power. He talked about starting a YouTube channel to share his life experiences. Destiny and her 25-year-old sister, Isla, remember their father always laughing and eating. Especially eating. Sergio’s appetite was so ravenous that his grandchildren started calling him “Tata Chicken.” Sergio would laugh at the moniker — and then take his grandkids to get some chicken. His post-release life was hardly carefree, of course. After his release, Sergio worked for four years at a construction company and then at Tempe manufacturer Coxreels, but he had been out of work for about a year before his death, Destiny said. He mainly helped Maria around the house. Outside of it, he felt constantly harassed by police, and his own history with law enforcement plagued his thoughts. “It looked like they always picked on him,” said Renee. “He didn’t do nothing, but he would get mad and ask, ‘Why are you following me?’” There’s no indication that the Phoenix cops who stopped Sergio on his bike had any knowledge of his criminal history. But his sour history with the police may have been on Sergio’s mind. Though the body-cam footage of his fateful encounter with Phoenix officers doesn’t reveal much, Sergio can be heard asking for one thing over and over: Help. Playing a hunch In the early morning hours of his last day on Earth, Sergio was biking to the house where two of his kids — Isla and Sergio Jr. — lived in Phoenix, Destiny said. According to a police report, he was wearing a red shirt with Al Pacino as Scarface on the front. Phoenix police officers Peter De La Pena and Andrew Estrella stopped him near A collage of photos of Sergio Alvarez outside Maria Alvarez’s home in February. (TJ L’Heureux) A photo, taken by Phoenix police, shows the aftermath of the shooting of Sergio Alvarez and officer Andrew Estrella. (Phoenix Police Department) A year ago, Phoenix police killed a man they stopped for a bike light infraction. Exactly what happened remains a mystery. BY TJ L’HEUREUX
