Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
PHOENIX — A set of 911 tapes that a prosecutor tried to withhold from a grand jury proved instrumental in helping acquit two Phoenix brothers who had been indicted on charges of murder and aggravated assault in a 2007 gang shootout.
On Tuesday after listening to the tapes in detail, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury came back with six not-guilty and six deadlocked verdicts against Jonathon Mena Cobian, 27, and his half brother John Mitchell Mena, 25.
In the early days of the case, a deputy Maricopa County attorney tried to prevent a grand jury from hearing the tapes, even after being ordered by a judge to play them, resulting in a finding of prosecutorial misconduct.
The case unfolded in June 2007, when the two men faced a carload of known gangsters in the front yard of their mother's house in Phoenix.
By the time the brothers stopped shooting, three people were dead and three were gravely wounded.
Cobian and Mena claimed self-defense. They were charged with murder, and their fate depended on two 911 calls that Cobian made on that day.
Agustin Hernandez, 17, Miguel Rodriguez, 20, and Alejandro Hernandez, 18, were killed in the shootout. Cynthia Hernandez, who was in her 30s, and her teenage daughter Alyssa Hernandez were wounded, as was another teen, Jorge Rodriguez. Two other teens, Cyndi Holguin and Apolinar Rodriguez, were uninjured.
The brothers claimed the victims, who they knew by their gang names — Sleepy, Smiley, Scrappy, Psycho, Joker — had attacked them.
The encounter was the second that day between Cobian and several of the gang members. They had confronted and fought with Cobian earlier at his mother's house, looking for Mena, who had quit the gang. They said they would come back, and they made good on the threat.
Prosecutors maintained that the carload was on its way to the lake to go swimming. During her closing argument, prosecutor Keli Luther said that one of the dead gang members, Miguel Rodriguez, had come to share the good news with "his best friend," Mena, that he was going to join the Marines.
Cobian, she said, was afraid that Mena, who was on probation for another offense, would start running with the gang again.
"They pulled guns on a carload of innocent people," Luther said.
The jury did not buy the argument.