On the night of April 23, 2017, Angel Valenzuela, a 28-year-old Hispanic / Latino male, was sitting in a vehicle with two younger male companions in the parking lot of the Mayfair Manor apartment complex at 5180 East 22nd Street in midtown Tucson, Arizona. The group had gone there to meet a friend and were waiting in their car around 9:30 p.m. when a man approached them in the lot.
Early reports from police indicated that the encounter was not random; investigators quickly noted indications that the situation was gang-related, setting the tone for what officers would later describe as a targeted act of violence rather than a spontaneous or accidental confrontation.
According to police and local news accounts, a verbal altercation broke out between the unknown man and the occupants of the vehicle. In the middle of that argument, the man pulled out a handgun and fired multiple rounds directly into the car, striking all three people inside at close range. Emergency crews from Tucson Fire responded and rushed all three victims to a nearby hospital, but Angel was pronounced dead before arrival due to the severity of his gunshot wounds. One of the other victims suffered injuries described as serious but not life-threatening, while the youngest passenger, initially reported as a teenage boy, sustained serious injuries yet was expected to survive. The attack reinforced investigators’ belief that this was a deliberate ambush tied to ongoing gang tensions in the area.
In the immediate aftermath, Tucson police launched a homicide investigation led by gang detectives. They determined that the shooter had fled the apartment complex in a dark-colored sedan after emptying multiple rounds into the parked vehicle and disappearing into the night before officers arrived. Detectives canvassed the neighborhood, looked for surveillance footage, and appealed publicly for tips, urging anyone with information to call 88-CRIME. For a time, the case remained in that limbo familiar to many gang-related shootings: investigators knew the shooting was targeted and had a general suspect description and vehicle information, but there was no one in custody and the community was left with a sense of unease while Angel’s death joined the growing list of gun homicides in Tucson.
As the investigation progressed, detectives ultimately focused on a suspect: 24-year-old Tucson man Isaac Cisco. Prosecutors later explained that Cisco was arrested weeks after the shooting when officers contacted him and discovered a handgun on the driver-side floorboard of his vehicle. Ballistic and forensic analysis tied that weapon to the April 2017 attack, linking him directly to the rounds fired into the car outside Mayfair Manor. Cisco, who was prohibited by law from possessing a firearm, was charged with first-degree murder and multiple counts of aggravated assault for shooting the three occupants of the vehicle, with Angel identified as the homicide victim in the case.
In January 2019, following a jury trial in Pima County, Cisco was found guilty of first-degree murder and four counts of aggravated assault for the shooting that killed Angel and wounded the two surviving passengers. At the time of his conviction he was already serving a prison sentence in an unrelated case, and prosecutors emphasized both his status as a prohibited possessor and the deliberate nature of the attack in which he opened fire on an occupied car. Sentencing in the murder case was scheduled for February 25, 2019, and subsequent public records and case summaries now list Angel’s killing as a solved homicide, with Cisco held legally responsible for the deadly gang-related shooting that took his life in Tucson that night.
