On the night of September 18, 2020, Javier Araiza was shot and killed in a midtown Tucson neighborhood, where he was publicly described in official and memorial records as a 20-year-old Hispanic/Latino male from Tucson, Arizona. His death occurred during a double-homicide incident that also claimed the life of 21-year-old Manaury Acevedo. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., Tucson Police officers were dispatched to the area of South Dodge Boulevard and East March Place after reports of gunfire.
Responding officers found Acevedo lying in the roadway near a white Chevy Tahoe, suffering from obvious gunshot wounds, with a handgun located next to him. Members of the community were already attempting CPR when officers arrived; Tucson Fire Department personnel took over lifesaving efforts, but Acevedo was pronounced dead at the scene.
As officers secured the scene and canvassed the neighborhood for evidence, they discovered a second victim in a nearby alley—Javier—also suffering from gunshot trauma. Tucson Fire personnel attempted medical treatment, but he too was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators later determined that Javier and Acevedo knew one another and had been together in the Chevy Tahoe before the shooting, indicating that the two victims were connected and that the killings formed a single incident rather than unrelated attacks. Public case summaries and memorial pages emphasize that both men were killed by gun violence in Tucson on September 18, 2020, and that Javier’s death is classified as a homicide rather than an accident or self-inflicted shooting.
In the early stages of the investigation, Tucson Police reported that there were no suspects in custody and appealed to the public for information, asking anyone with knowledge of the shooting to contact the local Crime Stoppers line. Within days, however, detectives identified a possible suspect. According to police and later media reports, information developed during the investigation led them to 19-year-old Raul Corrales. On Sunday, September 20, 2020, Corrales made contact with authorities and turned himself in near the 3100 block of East Silverlake Road. He was arrested and booked into the Pima County Jail on two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Javier and Acevedo, with officials noting that additional charges could be added as the case progressed. Crime-tracking databases now list the double homicide as a “solved” case, reflecting that a named suspect was arrested and formally charged, even though publicly accessible records do not clearly summarize any later trial outcome or sentencing.
Public documentation of Javier’s identity includes a notable discrepancy that has persisted in some records. Advocacy and memorial sites, drawing on early police communications, list him as “Javier Araiza Anaya, age 26,” while later media corrections and funeral-home records identify him as Javier Araiza Lugo, born June 25, 2000, and therefore 20 at the time of his death. Local news outlets have explicitly noted that Tucson Police originally misidentified him as “26-year-old Javier Araiza Anaya” before correcting both his surname and age in updated releases. Despite this, some national gun-violence memorial pages still use the earlier name and age, which is why both versions appear in online sources that track his case. Together, those records portray Javier as a young Latino man whose life ended in an alley off a Tucson street, his death bound up with that of a friend in a single burst of violence, and whose case is remembered both in official homicide files and in community-run memorials dedicated to victims of gun violence.
