Curtis Eugene West Jr, a 25-year-old male Black/African American from Phoenix, Arizona, was fatally shot in the early morning hours of June 5, 2022, in the parking lot of The Lounge Soho nightclub in Mesa, Arizona. Police were called to the club, located near Southern Avenue and Alma School Road, after reports of gunfire outside the business sometime after 2 a.m., with some accounts placing the response around 2:20 a.m.
When officers arrived, they found West and another man, later identified as 23-year-old Willie D’Angelo Love of Maricopa, lying in the parking lot with obvious gunshot wounds, and both were pronounced dead at the scene.
In addition to the two men who died, officers searching the area discovered two more victims who had been shot but survived; they were transported to a hospital with injuries that were described as non-life-threatening. News and case-tracking sites describe the shooting as erupting suddenly in the nightclub’s parking lot, turning an ordinary weekend night into a chaotic crime scene that deeply affected the families of both men who were killed. Public records related to the incident consistently place West’s date of death as June 5, 2022, in Mesa, Arizona.
When the first Mesa officers arrived at the club, they saw a silver passenger car leaving the area at a high rate of speed and initiated a pursuit. The chase ended a short distance away, and three occupants of the car were detained. Officers did not initially find a weapon inside the vehicle, but when they retraced the car’s route back toward the nightclub, they located a discarded gun along the roadway. Two of the three people from the car were arrested and booked on charges described by police as not directly associated with the homicide or shooting incident, while the third person was released after being detained. Gun-violence incident data summarizing the case also indicates that multiple male subjects tied to the incident were classified as “subject-suspect” and listed with a status of “arrested,” which aligns with the reports that two of the detained individuals were taken into custody.
Despite those early detentions and arrests on unrelated charges, public records from the Mesa Police Department later identified the shooting deaths of West and Love at 1457 W. Southern Avenue as one of a small number of 2022 homicides that remained unsolved, with no homicide charges filed in connection with their killings as of January 10, 2023. Case-tracking sites that profile the incident continue to request updates or information from the public, and no widely reported later court records or police statements indicate that anyone has been formally charged with West’s killing. Taken together, the available online information shows that while several people were detained and at least two were arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Mesa nightclub shooting, authorities have not publicly announced any suspect charged specifically with the homicide of Curtis Eugene West Jr, and the case has been treated in official summaries as an unresolved homicide.
