Arizona’s jury finished a seven‑month trial on Thursday, giving a death sentence to Cleophus Cooksey Jr. for eight murders that took place in the Phoenix area over three weeks in 2017.
Cooksey, who also faced charges of kidnapping, armed robbery and attempted sexual assault, was convicted of killing a range of strangers—including a security guard, two men found shot in a parked car, and a woman whose body was recovered naked from the waist down in an alley.
The jury handed down the death penalty for six of the eight murders. When it came to the killings of his own mother and stepfather, the jury was not unanimous, and prosecutors are weighing whether to push for a second sentencing hearing or to let a judge assign life terms on those two counts.
Rachel Mitchell, the Maricopa County Attorney, said the agency was considering both options. “Anyone who questions why we need the death penalty needs to look no further than this case,” Mitchell said in a statement.
“It takes a special kind of evil to prey upon the vulnerable and needlessly take the lives of eight innocent people. Death is the only just punishment for him, and we will do everything in our power to see it carried through.”
Cooksey, 43, had a history as an aspiring musician and claimed innocence, even though investigators tied him to the killings with evidence recovered from his mother’s apartment after her death.
The forensic work linked a gun used in several attacks, vehicle keys that belonged to another victim, and a necklace that Cooksey was wearing when he was arrested. His DNA was also found on one of the victims, Maria Villanueva, 43.
The assault campaign began with the murders of Parker Smith, 21, and Andrew Remillard, 27, who were shot while seated in a parked car on November 27, 2017.
Five days later, security guard Salim Richards, 31, was killed while walking to his girlfriend’s apartment. Over the following two weeks, Latorrie Beckford, 29, and Kristopher Cameron, 21, were fatally shot in separate Glendale apartment complexes, and Maria Villanueva’s body was discovered in an alley in Phoenix.
The final fatal event occurred when police arrived at Cooksey’s mother’s apartment on December 17, 2017; Cooksey confessed to cutting his hand and threatened an officer with a knife when they tried to detain him.
Cooksey’s case follows two other serial shooting outbreaks in the Phoenix metropolitan area. In late 2015, a series of 11 freeway shootings left several people wounded but no one seriously injured, and the only charged individual was later cleared of all charges.
Another campaign began in 2016, culminating in the arrest of bus driver Aaron Juan Saucedo in April 2017 for nine murders. He faces a pending death‑penalty prosecution, although his trial has been delayed until December 2026 and he maintains his innocence.
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