TUCSON CRIME FREE COALITION

"Sadly Predictable": The Downtown Mass Shooting Was Not a Bolt From the Blue. It Was the Foreseeable Result of a Prosecution That Never Happened.

Nine of our neighbors were shot in downtown Tucson in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 19 — two of them on the patio of Empire Pizza, a place many of us have taken our own families. The man accused of opening fire into that crowd, 21-year-old David Leroy French, was not a stranger to our justice system. He was, at that very moment, serving a four-year probation term for pointing an AR-15-style rifle at a car wash employee and firing at him in October 2024.

Let that sink in. He fired a rifle at a working man doing his job at 4:45 in the morning — and twenty-one months later he was free, downtown, and armed.

(As with any pending case, Mr. French is presumed innocent of the July 19 charges until proven guilty. The 2024 conviction, however, is a matter of settled court record — and it is that record this newsletter examines.)

What the Arizona Daily Star Got Right — and What It Let Slide

The Star's July 23 article ("County Attorney didn't seek prison in prior case for Tucson mass shooting suspect. Here's why") deserves credit for asking the question at all. But read it carefully and you'll notice something: the headline promises an explanation, and the article never actually delivers one.

Here is what County Attorney Laura Conover offered when asked why her office dropped the dangerous-offense allegation — the allegation that carried mandatory prison time — and then stood silent at sentencing:

1.      Her office doesn't remember the case. By her own account, the office handles so much volume that no one there has any real recollection of how this decision was made. That is not an explanation. That is an admission that a man who fired a rifle at another human being passed through her office as paperwork.

2.      "We cannot take every shots fired to trial." Note the framing: a shooting at a Tucson worker is filed under "every shots fired" — routine, unremarkable, one of thousands. When firing a rifle at an employee becomes background noise to the office charged with prosecuting it, we have a problem no press release can fix.

3.      Her policies are "data driven." This is the claim the Star let stand unchallenged, and it is the one the actual court file demolishes. Keep reading.

The Data Existed. Her Office Ignored It.

The Tucson Crime Free Coalition has reviewed the court record in State v. French, CR2024-3869-001, including the presentence report prepared for the court. Here is what the "data" actually said:

•      The Offender Screening Tool — a validated risk instrument used statewide and approved by the Administrative Office of the Courts — scored French at 19, placing him in the HIGH risk classification (the range for "High" begins at 16).

•      The report expressly found that he met the criteria for Intensive Probation Supervision.

•      Domain scores included 75% on Family/Social Relationships, 67% on Drug Abuse, and 50% each on Mental Health and Residence/Neighborhood — with the report noting that domains scoring 60% or higher must be addressed in supervision.

•      His statement to police: he was drunk, and his memory of firing the rifle was limited.

So let's be precise about what happened here. A validated, state-approved risk instrument — the very kind of "data" Ms. Conover invokes — flagged this defendant as HIGH risk. The prosecution had already dropped the dangerous-offense allegation that would have guaranteed prison. And then, at sentencing, the County Attorney's office made no sentencing recommendation at all.

That is not data-driven prosecution. That is the absence of prosecution. The data was sitting in the file. What was missing was judgment, and common sense, and the will to use them.

This Was a Slam-Dunk Case — Which Makes the Retreat Inexplicable

Prosecutors sometimes drop allegations because a case is shaky: a reluctant witness, no physical evidence, an identification that might not survive cross-examination. None of that applies here. By the standards of criminal litigation, State v. French was as close to a slam dunk as cases get:

•      The entire incident was captured on video surveillance. The footage shows French pulling the rifle from his pants, pointing it at the victim, and firing in his direction as the man fled across the street.

•      The victim positively identified French as the man in the footage.

•      When police arrested him six days later, French was wearing the very same jacket he wore in the surveillance video the night of the shooting.

•      After being read his Miranda rights, French admitted it. He admitted to being at the car wash that night, admitted to shooting the rifle, and described the weapon as black and tan — matching the AR-15-style rifle in the footage.

•      A search warrant recovered three firearms from the vehicle he was in when detained.

Video. Identification. The same clothing. A confession. Recovered weapons. There was no evidentiary weakness to bargain around, no trial risk that justified giving away the dangerous-offense allegation and the mandatory prison term that came with it. Ms. Conover told the Star her office gave French "barely any benefit at all." The record says otherwise: with a case this airtight, the plea discount wasn't a necessity — it was a giveaway. When an office surrenders mandatory prison on its strongest cases, what exactly is it holding firm on?

Silence Is a Message

Former chief criminal deputy county attorney David Berkman told the Star it is unusual — and contrary to what a prosecutor is supposed to do — for the State to offer no sentencing position in a case like this.

He's right, and every member of this coalition who has ever sat in a courtroom knows why. When the State stands up at sentencing and says nothing, the message to the judge is unmistakable: we are not invested in this case. Judge Goodwin said on the record that he was "very much on the fence." A judge on the fence, facing a defense attorney making an impassioned pitch for probation and a prosecutor offering nothing on the other side, will fall exactly one way. The outcome of this case was not a surprise. It was sadly, entirely predictable — and the party best positioned to change it chose silence.

In Her Own Words: The County Attorney's Interview Made It Worse

On Thursday morning, July 23, Ms. Conover sat for an extended on-camera interview about the French case. TCFC has reviewed the full recording. It was not an accounting. It was a defensive performance built on deflection — and at several points, her statements are contradicted by her own office's court filings. We invite every member to watch it in full and check what follows against the record.

1. She misstated the facts of her own case. Ms. Conover described the 2024 incident as an argument in which a shot was fired — and then added, unprompted, that the shot was fired "not at someone." Her own office's charging documents say otherwise. The interim complaint sworn by Tucson Police states that French pointed the rifle in Jose Hernandez's direction and fired as Hernandez fled across the street to get away; the presentence report states he fired one round in the direction of the victim; Hernandez reported a laser sight trained on him and told police he feared he would be shot. The charge — brought by her office — was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against a person. When the elected prosecutor goes on camera and minimizes the very conduct her office charged and convicted, that is not context. That is revisionism, and the file refutes it.

2. She admitted the plea was engineered to make probation possible. Ms. Conover called it "barely any benefit at all" — the charge stayed a Class 3, she noted, and wasn't reduced to a lesser felony. But in the same breath she conceded that the plea gave French "a chance to ask the judge for probation." Members, understand what that "only break" actually was: under Arizona's dangerous-offense law, the dangerous-nature allegation her office dropped is precisely what mandates prison. Dropping it wasn't a technicality — it was the entire outcome. Her office deliberately opened the probation door, made no sentencing recommendation to close it, and now shrugs that "I'm not second-guessing the judge." The judge could only drive on the road her office paved. A prosecutor cannot disarm a case, stand silent at sentencing, and then take shelter behind the ruling of a judge she left to decide alone.

3. The sympathetic-kid story — from the "data driven" prosecutor. She described a 19-year-old with "zero criminal history," two jobs, employer letters, a big supportive family, a tearful apology, promises made. Set aside that the presentence report records a first arrest at age 12 and a childhood so unstable that child protective services was involved multiple times. Notice instead what kind of evidence she reached for: tears, testimonials, a good-kid impression — every one a soft, anecdotal factor. Meanwhile the actual data — the validated risk instrument her "data driven" brand is supposedly built on — scored this defendant HIGH risk (19, where "high" begins at 16). When the moment came to defend the outcome, the self-described data-driven prosecutor cited anecdotes and ignored her own instrument. We could not have scripted a clearer demonstration of this newsletter's thesis.

4. The volume straw man. She invoked 18,000 annual shots-fired incidents, 5 to 10 thousand cases presented to her office, 20,000 hypothetical trials — the numbers shifted as she spoke — and protested that the community is "hyperjudging one case." No one asked her office to try 18,000 cases. This case required no trial at all. French confessed. He was on video. He was arrested in the same jacket. The firearms were recovered. Preserving the dangerous allegation in a guilty plea, or simply standing up and asking for prison, consumes exactly zero trial capacity. The volume argument answers a question nobody posed — while conceding something alarming: that thousands of shootings have been triaged into background noise, with, in her words, thousands of people back from prison or on probation right now "for the exact same conduct."

5. She claimed a rigorous process — and total amnesia — in the same interview. Ms. Conover touted her office's 28-point "ongoing threat of harm analysis," applied, she says, to every custody request, plea, and sentencing position. She also said, repeatedly, that not a single person in her office has any independent memory of this case, that she is "an administrator" with no caseload, and that she did not negotiate this plea. Both cannot rescue her. Either the 28-point analysis was applied to a HIGH-risk defendant who fired a rifle at a fleeing man and it produced no sentencing position at all — or the celebrated process simply didn't happen. One is a failure of judgment; the other is a failure of management. There is no third option.

6. The blame went everywhere but her office. In one sitting she pointed to the judge, the cash bail system ("we have no control over that" — though prosecutors argue bond positions in courtrooms every single day), COVID, social media algorithms, the media ("fear sells"), American culture, underfunded preschools, and a retired critic she mocked for not finding "joy" in retirement rather than answering his substantive point that prosecutors are supposed to take sentencing positions. She even managed to claim that violent crime is in a "huge downward spike" and that her office is drowning in an unmanageable flood of violence — in the same interview, deployed as convenient. If crime is down, the office had capacity to handle a slam-dunk rifle case properly. If the office is overwhelmed, her policies are not working. She cannot have both.

7. "Go to bed." Perhaps most tone-deaf of all: her advice that people have no reason to be out on the streets between 2 and 4 a.m. — offered days after nine Tucsonans were shot at 2 a.m. as patrons of the downtown entertainment district this city spends millions promoting. And remember Jose Hernandez, the 2024 victim: he was at work at 4:45 a.m. — exactly the person her own carve-out is supposed to protect — and her office still declined to say a single word on his behalf at sentencing. The victims followed the rules. The consequences fell on them anyway.

We were not alone in noticing the deflection. Empire Pizza — the business whose own patio was sprayed with gunfire — publicly objected that the focus of this tragedy was being shifted to gun control, pointing instead to the number of violent offenders who are simply not being prosecuted. When the victims themselves are telling elected leaders that the problem is prosecution, not hardware, perhaps it is time to listen.

This Was Not a Movie-Theater Shooter

When we picture a mass shooting, we picture the unforeseeable: the disturbed loner, the Aurora theater, the random act no system could have flagged. That is not what happened in downtown Tucson.

David French was first arrested at age 12. He was suspended out of middle school. He completed the ninth grade and never returned. Both parents were incarcerated during his childhood; child protective services was involved with the family multiple times. By 15 he was smoking marijuana regularly; by 19 he was drunk and firing a rifle at a car wash employee. Every institution that touched this young man's life — school, family services, and finally the county attorney's office — had him squarely in view, and every one of them passed him along.

This is not mental illness striking from nowhere. This is what a broken Tucson produces: a failed economy on the south side, failed schools, failed intervention, and — at the last and most critical checkpoint — a prosecutor's office that had him convicted of a violent Class 3 felony, holding a HIGH-risk assessment, and asked the court for nothing.

We say this with genuine sorrow for everyone involved, including French himself. His own presentence report describes a childhood of chaos no child chooses. But sympathy for how a dangerous young man was made is not a reason to leave him armed among us. It is a reason to intervene decisively — which a prison term with mandatory treatment, or at absolute minimum the Intensive Probation Supervision his own risk assessment called for, would have been. He received neither.

What TCFC Is Asking

4.      A public accounting from the Pima County Attorney's Office of how the dangerous-offense allegation in CR2024-3869-001 came to be dropped — in a case with video surveillance, a positive identification, a post-Miranda admission, and recovered firearms — who approved it, and why no sentencing recommendation was made. "We don't remember" is not an answer.

5.      A written policy requiring the office to take a sentencing position in every violent felony involving the discharge of a firearm at a person.

6.      An explanation of why a defendant scored HIGH risk and IPS-eligible was placed on standard probation.

7.      Data — real data — published quarterly: how many dangerous-offense allegations has this office dropped in plea agreements, and what were the outcomes? If the policies are truly "data driven," the data should welcome daylight.

8.      A public correction of the County Attorney's on-camera statement that the 2024 shot was fired "not at someone." Her office's own sworn complaint and the presentence report both state the round was fired in the direction of the fleeing victim. The community is entitled to an accurate account of the case from the official who charged it.

Nine Tucsonans in critical condition deserve more than "no one has much memory of that case." So does Jose Hernandez, the car wash employee who was fired upon in 2024 and whom victim services could not even manage to reach before sentencing. So do all of us.

The Tucson Crime Free Coalition is a nonpartisan association of residents, neighborhood leaders, and business owners advocating for public safety and accountable governance in Tucson and Pima County. Sources: State v. French, Pima County Superior Court No. CR2024-3869-001 (interim complaint, presentence report, sentencing minute entry, and conditions of probation); Arizona Daily Star, July 23, 2026; KOLD 13 News coverage of the July 23, 2026 city-county gun violence roundtable; and the County Attorney's recorded July 23, 2026 interview (transcript on file with TCFC).