Current print subscribers can create a free account by clicking here
Otherwise, follow the link below to join.
To Our Valued Readers –
Visitors to our website will be limited to five stories per month unless they opt to subscribe. The five stories do not include our exclusive content written by our journalists.
For $6.99, less than 20 cents a day, digital subscribers will receive unlimited access to YourValley.net, including exclusive content from our newsroom and access to our Daily Independent e-edition.
Our commitment to balanced, fair reporting and local coverage provides insight and perspective not found anywhere else.
Your financial commitment will help to preserve the kind of honest journalism produced by our reporters and editors. We trust you agree that independent journalism is an essential component of our democracy. Please click here to subscribe.
Need to set up your free e-Newspaper all-access account? click here.
Non-subscribers
Click here to see your options for becoming a subscriber.
Register to comment
Click here create a free account for posting comments.
Note that free accounts do not include access to premium content on this site.
I am anchor
FIRST RESPONDERS
Brothers arrested in Mesa, 1 charged with murder in roommate’s death
Posted
INDEPENDENT NEWSMEDIA
Mesa police have arrested two brothers and charged the eldest with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a roommate.
Jesus Baez-Franco, 36, and Oscar Baez-Franco, 26, were arrested in connection with a shooting Thursday morning, Feb. 16, at an apartment in the 500 block of East Southern Ave. in Mesa.
Police went to the apartment at about 6:30 a.m. Thursday on a report of a man in the bathroom with a gun.
When officers arrived, police said, three people came out of the apartment through their bedroom windows. One person told officers there was a man inside with a gun.
Another person, Jesus Baez-Franco, told officers that while he was in his bedroom, he heard “someone inside the apartment rack a gun slide,” authorities said, adding he said that he shot his own firearm through the closed bedroom door toward the main living area of the apartment.
Oscar Baez-Franco told officers he awoke to a gunshot and opened his bedroom door to see his brother.
“After his brother said, ‘They are coming for us!’, Oscar fired his own handgun into the floor of the hallway,” police said in a release.
Officers found a man dead inside the apartment with gunshot wounds. The brothers identified the man with a nickname and confirmed that he stayed in the apartment with them.
After serving a search warrant on the apartment, officers found methamphetamine, officials said.
Jesus Baez-Franco was booked into jail on several charges, including second-degree murder, and he is being held on a $1 million bond.
Oscar Baez-Franco was booked into jail for disorderly conduct/reckless discharge of a weapon and held on a $20,000 bond.