Caylen Fritz, 22, a Black/African American male, was caught in the middle of a chaotic burst of violence just after 2 a.m. on July 5, 2025, in Dallas’ Deep Ellum entertainment district. According to police, simmering altercations between two groups spilled into a parking lot at 2600 Canton Street near South Good Latimer Expressway, where gunfire erupted and multiple people were struck.
Officers racing toward the commotion found one wounded victim in the street, then pushed into the lot as crowds fled. Moments later they located Fritz on the ground with gunshot wounds, as the scene fractured into overlapping emergencies and a search for armed suspects.
As officers converged, they encountered 19-year-old Tevin Valentine holding a handgun while standing over Fritz. Body-camera footage later released by Dallas police shows officers shouting for Valentine to drop the weapon. Investigators say Valentine ran and pointed the gun toward Officer Luis Garza-Fuantos, who fired a single rifle round, wounding him; several other shooting victims were also transported from the area. Police recovered multiple firearms, including the handgun in Valentine’s possession, which had been reported stolen in University Park in 2022. Fritz was taken from the lot and later died at the hospital, a focal point of a night that left at least five others injured and the neighborhood rattled.
In the days that followed, detectives began separating the parallel threads of the mass-injury shooting from the officer-involved encounter. On July 9, the Dallas Police Fugitive Unit arrested 19-year-old Gael Aguilar in connection with Fritz’s death; the department announced he was charged with murder and booked into the Dallas County Jail. Local coverage and subsequent roundups of July homicides repeated the department’s account and associated the case to the Deep Ellum parking-lot gunfight that preceded the officer’s single shot at Valentine.
Authorities also laid out a broad timeline of the outbreak: fights beginning around 2:20 a.m., an initial gunshot victim flagging down officers minutes later, and a rush into the lot as people scattered. By the time the area was stabilized, police tallied multiple transports, a suspect wounded by an officer, and Fritz’s death, which amplified ongoing safety debates in Deep Ellum that summer. While Valentine survived with non-life-threatening injuries and was identified as the armed man who fled, the central criminal allegation tied to Fritz’s killing rests with Aguilar’s arrest and murder charge, as investigators continued processing the tangle of victims, witnesses, and weapons from the parking lot that night.
