Veleria Arnette “V” Rascoe Sharp, a 48-year-old Female Black / African American paralegal, lived and worked in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she was employed at the downtown family-law firm Burt, Feldman, Grenier. On June 1, 2018, she was at work in the firm’s offices when an armed man entered and opened fire, targeting staff connected to a long-running divorce case that the firm had handled years earlier.
At about 2:15 p.m., the gunman shot both Veleria and fellow paralegal Laura Anderson inside or just outside the office suite. Despite having been shot in the head, Veleria managed to make it out of the building and stagger into the nearby street to seek help, reportedly reaching an intersection and alerting a driver—described in some accounts as a limo or shuttle bus driver—before collapsing. Emergency responders took her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead; Anderson was found mortally wounded inside the office and died at the scene. The attack immediately drew a large police response, and investigators quickly linked the shooting to a high-profile killing the previous day in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area.
Within hours, ballistics and other evidence connected the weapon used against Veleria and Anderson to the earlier murder of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Steven Pitt, who had been shot outside his office on May 31, 2018. Over the next day, investigators also tied the same gun to the killing of psychologist and counselor Marshall Levine in his Scottsdale office shortly after midnight on June 2. All of these victims shared a common link to the same man: Pitt had evaluated the shooter during a contentious divorce; the Burt, Feldman, Grenier firm had represented the shooter’s ex-wife in those proceedings; and Levine was subletting office space from a counselor who had been ordered to see the shooter’s son during the custody dispute. Police concluded that the victims were deliberately chosen because of their roles in that divorce and the associated court process, and they ultimately linked two additional homicide victims—Mary Simmons and Bryon Thomas in Fountain Hills—to the same spree.
The primary suspect was identified as 56-year-old Dwight Lamon Jones. According to police and later reports, the breakthrough in the investigation came when Jones’s ex-wife’s current husband, a retired Phoenix police detective, noticed that several crime scenes were connected to people involved in the old divorce case and alerted law enforcement. Once Jones was identified as the suspect, officers placed him under surveillance and tracked him to an Extended Stay hotel in north Scottsdale. As tactical teams closed in during the early morning hours of June 4, 2018, Jones fired multiple rounds at officers from his room. When SWAT ultimately entered using specialized equipment, they found that he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Authorities later disclosed that Jones legally owned the handgun used in the killings despite a prior domestic-violence arrest years earlier, and they publicly stated that he was responsible for six homicides, including the murders of Veleria and the other victims in the spree. Because Jones killed himself and no one else has been publicly identified as involved, there were no arrests or prosecutions for Veleria Arnette “V” Rascoe Sharp’s killing; the case is considered solved with the primary suspect deceased and no additional suspects sought.
