Elizabeth Smith was a 29-year-old White / Caucasian woman from Phoenix, Arizona whose life was cut short by gun violence on August 1, 2014. Online case-tracking and memorial sites agree that she died in Phoenix on that date and classify her death as a “death by force” and a gun homicide, placing her among thousands of Arizona victims whose deaths involved deliberate violence rather than natural or accidental causes.
According to a national gun-violence victim database that links her case to contemporary news coverage, the shooting in which Elizabeth was killed took place in northeast Phoenix and left one person dead and another wounded. The incident was reported at the time under headlines describing “1 killed, 1 wounded in northeast Phoenix shooting,” indicating that police were dealing with a multiple-victim crime scene with Elizabeth as the fatal victim and a second person who survived with injuries.
Follow-up articles cited by these memorial sites show that the investigation quickly focused on a male suspect. Within a few days, local media reported under headlines such as “Phoenix man charged in murder-suicide plan” and “Suspect jailed in shooting death of girlfriend,” and a syndicated report noted that police had arrested a Phoenix man accused of fatally shooting a woman as part of a planned murder-suicide. Together, these sources indicate that investigators believed the victim had been shot by an intimate partner who allegedly intended to kill her and then himself, and that this man was taken into custody and jailed in connection with the case. However, the surviving online text does not provide his name, the precise charges, or the eventual outcome of the prosecution, and key underlying news stories are now blocked behind archival or technical restrictions.
Modern open-source case summaries emphasize how little else is publicly documented about what happened to Elizabeth. One Arizona homicide database notes that, despite searches of news archives and Maricopa County criminal court records, there is no readily accessible detail on the exact circumstances of the shooting, the full narrative of events, or the final legal disposition of the suspect who was reported arrested at the time. Memorial pages for her case invite friends, family, and community members to contribute photos and biographical information, and forum posts referencing her speak of the impact she had on people around her, but they do not add further verified facts about the crime itself. As a result, the publicly available online record today preserves only a partial picture: a young woman killed by gunfire in a northeast Phoenix shooting, at least one man arrested and accused of planning a murder-suicide, and an enduring gap in open information about how the justice system ultimately handled the case.
