On March 17, 2017, shortly after midnight, a double shooting took place at or near the Airport Inn, an extended-stay motel close to 24th Street and Van Buren in Phoenix, Arizona. Local TV coverage described officers responding to a shooting call at the motel area in the early-morning hours, while a later syndicated segment summarized the incident as a “double shooting at Phoenix motel” in which two men were shot. Case-tracking sites and memorial pages identify the man who died as Anthony T.
Free, a 47-year-old Black/African American male; some sources also render his surname as “Freeman,” but they match on age, date, city, and basic circumstances, indicating they are referring to the same victim. According to those records, Anthony was mortally wounded in the gunfire while another man was also struck and survived with injuries, consistent with a news headline noting that the double shooting “leaves 1 dead, 1 hurt.”
Publicly available material about Anthony focuses less on the precise sequence of events inside the motel and more on who he was to the people who knew him. On a national gun-violence memorial site, friends and acquaintances describe him as tough but deeply caring, someone remembered as “a hard man but a very caring loving man,” a “bike dude” who worked from home and was devoted to his two dogs, treating them like his children. One long-time friend wrote that Anthony had been important to their life before and after getting sober, recalling him as the kind of person who would quietly care for a loved one—bathing and clothing her when she could not care for herself—and expressing shock at only learning of his death years later. These tributes portray a man rooted in his local community, with close personal relationships that were abruptly severed by the violence at the motel.
As for the investigation, early TV reports from that night and brief wire-style summaries simply state that two men were shot at the Airport Inn and that police were investigating the circumstances. A later case summary on a homicide-tracking site confirms that Anthony’s death is recorded as a gun-violence homicide on March 17, 2017, in Phoenix but does not list the case as solved or name any offender, in contrast to other Phoenix motel shootings on the same site where specific suspects and arrest outcomes are documented. Likewise, neither the memorial entry nor the brief online news blurbs linked from it mention a suspect description, a motive, or any subsequent arrest. Based on the absence of follow-up reporting or official announcements in the sources currently available online, there is no public indication that a suspect has been identified or charged in connection with the shooting that took Anthony’s life; from what is visible in open records, the details of who pulled the trigger and why remain unresolved in the public record.
