In the early hours of Thanksgiving Day 2021, Phoenix police and firefighters responded to reports of an injured person near the corridor of 44th–48th Street and McDowell Road in east Phoenix, where they found 27-year-old Cory Ángel Rodríguez, a Hispanic/Latino man, mortally wounded from gunfire and pronounced him dead at the scene. Emergency calls came in around 9:30 a.m.
reporting a man down near the intersection, and when paramedics arrived they quickly determined there was nothing they could do; homicide detectives from the Phoenix Police Department later classified the case as a violent homicide caused by gunshot injuries.
Family accounts and memorials describe Rodríguez as a devoted father to two young children who was engaged to be married in December 2021. His fiancée Elia and he had planned their wedding for December 20, 2021, and relatives wrote that he was “our bright light of sunshine,” an outdoors-loving person who enjoyed traveling, joking with loved ones, and spending time with his close-knit family, where he was the youngest of six siblings. According to a family fundraiser, the day before his body was discovered he had spent Thanksgiving preparing food and getting ready for an upcoming road trip, then decided to walk to a nearby 7-Eleven to pick up a few items. While he was walking home, only a few blocks from his destination, relatives say he was robbed, shot, and left in the area where he was later found.
Investigators have said that when first responders reached Rodríguez, he was already beyond help, and detectives noted injuries “consistent with homicide” from gunfire rather than an accident or medical emergency. Spanish-language coverage of the case emphasized that there were no known eyewitnesses to the shooting, that neighbors in the surrounding area did not report hearing shots or a confrontation, and that detectives had not identified a clear motive. The Phoenix Police Department’s Homicide Unit appealed publicly for information, urging community members to call detectives directly or contact tip lines if they knew anything about how Rodríguez ended up shot near the park and bike-path area by McDowell Road that morning.
Despite those appeals, publicly available records and case summaries indicate that no suspect has been identified or arrested in connection with Rodríguez’s killing. A Silent Witness reward flyer issued in late 2021 describes the case as a homicide that occurred around 2:00 a.m. in the park at the northwest corner of 48th Street and McDowell Road and lists the suspect or suspects as “unknown,” offering up to $2,000 for information leading to an arrest or indictment. Subsequent listings on memorial and crime-tracking websites, some of which were updated as recently as 2025, continue to describe the case as unsolved and note that no suspect information has been released to the public, reinforcing that, as far as open sources show, the person or people responsible for Rodríguez’s death have not been publicly named or brought into custody.
