Amanda Johnson a 30-year-old female from Peoria, Arizona, whose race or ethnicity was not specified in available public records, was shot in the head on October 25, 2014, during a confrontation inside a small home near 67th Avenue and Greenway Road. At the time, she had been staying for about a week at the house of Rose Perry, a local resident who frequently allowed homeless or transient individuals to take shelter in her home, while Johnson was separated from her husband and their two
children.
According to investigators’ accounts summarized in later reporting, an argument broke out inside Perry’s living room involving Johnson, 53-year-old Mark Anthony Barquera, and another woman who had been staying there. As Johnson sat on a couch beside Perry, Barquera produced a handgun and pointed it at Johnson’s head. Perry later told police that Johnson shouted at him to put the gun down, but Barquera fired a single shot at close range, striking Johnson in the head and knocking her from the couch to the floor. Perry placed a blanket over her as she lay critically injured until officers and paramedics arrived and transported her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Responding Peoria police officers found Barquera still at the residence and arrested him. He claimed to have acted in self-defense, telling detectives that he was in fear for his life; at the same time, officers noted that he behaved irrationally and spoke about “demonic forces” in the home and described the living room as a portal to another dimension. A search of his person uncovered a small bag of a crystal-like substance that later tested positive for methamphetamine. Barquera was booked into custody on suspicion of second-degree murder in Johnson’s death and for dangerous-drug possession, with jail records reflecting those charges following his arrest on October 26, 2014.
Court and corrections records show that prosecutors ultimately secured a conviction against Barquera for manslaughter in Maricopa County, rather than the original second-degree murder charge. He was admitted to the Arizona Department of Corrections on May 24, 2016, to serve a 16-year sentence, and was housed at the Lewis complex’s Stiner Unit under a manslaughter commitment. Subsequent appellate and post-conviction filings, including a 2020 Arizona Court of Appeals decision and a later petition for review to the Arizona Supreme Court, indicate that Barquera’s efforts to overturn or modify his conviction have been denied, leaving his conviction and lengthy term of imprisonment in place and no other suspects publicly identified in Johnson’s killing.
Johnson’s death is recorded in national gun-violence databases and memorial sites as a fatal shooting in Peoria on October 25, 2014, underscoring that what began as an argument among people sharing a precarious shelter situation ended with a life lost and a single identified perpetrator held criminally responsible.
