Jose Flores, whose full name was reported as Jose Carlos Valdez Flores, was a 60-year-old man living in the Catalina area north of Tucson, Arizona. On the morning of June 4, 2021, he became the third victim in a violent neighbor dispute that escalated into a shooting. Public reports identify his name and age and describe him as a male victim but do not specify his race or ethnicity.
Shortly after 10 a.m.
that day, Pima County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the neighborhood near Coronado Sunset Drive and Coronado View Road after a 911 call from a woman who reported that her neighbor had shot her children. While deputies were on the way, they were flagged down by two adult male shooting victims who had left the immediate scene; fire and medical crews from the Golder Ranch Fire District were already treating them on the roadside. Both of those men were transported to a hospital with injuries described as non-life-threatening, and initial information pointed to an ongoing dispute between neighboring households as the backdrop for the attack.
When deputies proceeded to the residence where the gunfire had originated, they were told there might be another victim still inside. Entering the home, they encountered an older man and began trying to identify him. As additional information came in, deputies concluded that this man matched the description of the shooter, a 72-year-old neighbor named Benjamin Jacinto. During this contact, Jacinto moved behind a wall inside the house, and deputies then heard multiple gunshots from his direction. Following their training, they withdrew from the interior and established a containment perimeter around the property rather than rushing into a potentially active ambush.
While securing the scene outside, deputies discovered the body of Jose Flores, who had been fatally shot. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and subsequent reporting by memorial and obituary sites confirmed his identity as Jose Carlos Valdez Flores and his age as 60, with the date of death recorded as June 4, 2021, in Catalina, Arizona. In the meantime, tactical units, including SWAT officers and the regional bomb squad, deployed a remotely operated robot to re-enter the house where Jacinto had last been seen. Robot video showed that Jacinto himself was dead inside the residence from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, bringing a grim end to the standoff.
Investigators later described the violence as the culmination of a long-running, or “long-simmering,” neighbor feud between the two households, though they did not publicly disclose detailed specifics about its origin or history. Because the only identified suspect, Benjamin Jacinto, died at the scene from what authorities characterized as a self-inflicted gunshot wound, there were no arrests in connection with Jose Flores’s killing, and law enforcement did not announce any search for additional suspects. Public remembrance sites and obituary notices now present Flores primarily through the lens of loss—listing his full name, age, date of death, and funeral arrangements at a local Catholic church—while gun-violence memorial databases record him among those “lost to gun violence” in Catalina on that day.
