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Gilbert, Ariz., police Lt. Eric Shuhandler, 42, died at a hospital shortly before midnight after he was shot in the face at close range during a traffic stop on the night of Jan. 28, 2010, before two men led officers on a roughly 50-mile chase.

Shuhandler had stopped a utility pickup for a partially obscured license plate, taken the passenger's identification back to his patrol car and learned the man had an outstanding arrest warrant. When the 16-year veteran walked back to the truck, the passenger shot him in the face at close range, according to Maricopa County prosecutors, who said gunpowder was sprayed into the officer's eyes.

The truck sped off. Witnesses at a Taco Bell near Val Vista Drive and Baseline Road saw Shuhandler go down and ran to him. "My friend got on his radio and called in for help," Michael Clark told ABC15 in 2019. Clark said Shuhandler was still conscious, unable to speak, holding the driver's license out toward them. The Associated Press reported that a caller also told a 911 dispatcher that an officer had been shot, and that witnesses gave police a description of the truck.

Officers followed the pickup east out of the Phoenix suburbs on U.S. 60 for roughly 50 miles. The passenger climbed into the truck bed and threw tools, an air compressor tank and a generator into the path of pursuing cars, and fired at them, the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote in a later ruling. About half a dozen cruisers were knocked out of the chase by debris or gunfire. The truck ran out of gas at Top of the World, a small community on the highway above Superior, where both men were wounded in the legs in a final exchange of gunfire and taken into custody. "It is nothing short of a miracle that no officers or members of the public were injured or killed," Gilbert police Chief Timothy Dorn said at the time.

The driver, Daimen Joseph Irizarry, 30, of Gilbert, went to trial first. A jury convicted him in July 2010 of eight counts of aggravated assault, four counts of drive-by shooting and one count of unlawful flight from law enforcement, and a Maricopa County judge sentenced him to more than 107 years in prison. Irizarry maintained he was an unarmed bystander in the truck.

The passenger, Christopher Angel Redondo, 35, of Globe, was charged with first-degree murder and prosecutors sought the death penalty. After a 43-day trial, jurors convicted him on April 17, 2019, of first-degree murder, five counts of aggravated assault and two counts of drive-by shooting, and acquitted him of the remaining counts. They found two aggravating factors that made him eligible for execution, the killing of an on-duty officer and a prior murder conviction for the March 2009 death of Ernie Singh near Globe, for which Redondo was already serving life. The jury chose life over death, and the trial judge imposed natural life for the murder followed by consecutive terms on the other counts. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentences in September 2021.

Redondo died at the state prison complex in Buckeye on Jan. 26, 2024, at 49, the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry said. His death was ruled accidental and caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl intoxication, ABC15 reported. The recording posted here runs just under four minutes and combines Gilbert police radio traffic with the 911 call from the scene. Portions were redacted by the department before it was released.