On the evening of October 12, 2017, Nicholas Encalade, a 53-year-old Hispanic/Latino man, was visiting Iron Horse Park near Tucson’s Rattlesnake Bridge with an adult woman when what began as a routine outing turned into a fatal encounter. Shortly after 7:30 p.m., two young men approached the pair in the park and demanded their belongings during what police later characterized as a robbery.
The victims complied and handed over property, but one of the assailants produced a gun and shot Encalade, while the woman was not physically injured. First responders from Tucson Police and the Tucson Fire Department arrived soon after reports of shots fired near 75 N. 1st Avenue, found Encalade suffering from gunshot wounds, and rushed him to Banner University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Roughly fifteen minutes after the initial call from Iron Horse Park, officers were dispatched to a second scene at North 4th Avenue and East 9th Street, a short distance from the park, for a report of “unknown trouble” that also turned out to be gunfire-related. There, they located a wounded man with gunshot trauma, who was later determined by detectives to be one of the two suspects involved in the park robbery and shooting. Investigators concluded that the Iron Horse Park homicide and the second shooting were connected, and that the injured man from the follow-up scene was directly tied to the attack on Encalade and his companion. A second suspect remained at large in the immediate aftermath; early public descriptions emphasized that detectives were looking for a slender teenage male who had fled the park area on foot after the shooting.
As the investigation progressed, attention focused on two young men: Daren Encinas-Pablo and Joseph Anthony Santos. Court records and later reporting describe that the pair had approached Encalade and the woman in the park armed with a handgun, robbed them of approximately five dollars and some jewelry, and then started to leave before one of them turned back and opened fire on the couple. Police determined that the wounded man found shortly after the homicide was one of these two suspects and took him into custody while he was being treated for his injuries.
The second suspect, identified by Tucson police as 18-year-old Joseph Anthony Santos, was the subject of an arrest warrant on charges including homicide, armed robbery, and aggravated robbery. Investigators learned he had fled to the Tohono O’odham Nation, apparently believing that he could evade capture there. U.S. Marshals and tribal authorities ultimately located Santos; he was arrested on an unrelated tribal warrant, then held at the Tohono O’odham Tribal Adult Detention Center before being extradited to Pima County on the Tucson homicide warrant and booked into the county jail.
Subsequent prosecution clarified each suspect’s role in the killing. By 2019, court records showed that Daren Encinas-Pablo had been tried and convicted of first-degree murder for shooting Encalade during the robbery at Iron Horse Park. He received a life sentence in prison, with the possibility of parole after twenty-five years. Evidence presented in those proceedings described how he and Santos confronted Encalade and the woman, took their small amount of cash and jewelry, then, as they started to walk away, Encinas-Pablo turned back and fired, hitting Encalade at least four times. Santos, who had told investigators that Encinas-Pablo was responsible for the actual shooting, later pleaded guilty in 2018 to felony robbery in connection with the same incident and was sentenced to a term of four years’ probation. Together, those outcomes marked the formal resolution of the homicide case arising from the killing of Nicholas Encalade in Tucson on October 12, 2017.
