Brett Berholtz, a 23-year-old male of unknown race/ethnicity, was fatally shot on the night of January 16, 2016, in the parking lot of the Terrace Park apartments in west Phoenix, near 81st–83rd Avenue and Indian School Road. Police and media reports describe how officers were called to the complex around 10:30 p.m. and found two people in their twenties who had been shot: Berholtz and a 22-year-old woman.
Both were rushed to the hospital, where Berholtz died of his injuries while the woman was treated for what officials described as non-life-threatening wounds.
Investigators determined that the shooting was a drive-by attack. According to police and court documents summarized in news coverage, Berholtz, the woman, and another man had gone out to the apartment parking lot to retrieve a phone from a car when a passenger vehicle drove into the lot, turned around, and opened fire. Several shots were fired toward the group, striking Berholtz multiple times in the chest and hitting the woman in the hip or grazing her with a bullet. The third person with them was not physically injured and later became a key witness, telling police that he recognized the vehicle and believed it was associated with a residence suspected of involvement with the Mexican drug cartel.
In the days immediately following the killing, police appealed to the public for information as they searched for a suspect vehicle and a motive, describing the attack as a drive-by shooting that had taken place while the victims were simply standing outside in the parking lot. Friends interviewed by local media expressed disbelief that anyone would target Berholtz, characterizing him as a kind person and emphasizing how senseless the violence seemed. Gun-violence tracking and homicide-case databases later cataloged the case as a fatal shooting that occurred on January 16, 2016, in Phoenix, Arizona.
Roughly eleven days after the shooting, a critical break in the case came from the surviving female victim while she was recovering in the hospital. According to an ABC15 report based on court records, she repeatedly spoke a sequence of letters and numbers in her sleep; her mother wrote them down and passed them to investigators, who realized they were a license plate number. Using that information, Phoenix police located the suspected vehicle at a home near 48th Avenue and Indian School Road. On January 27, officers arrested a 15-year-old suspect at that residence and later the same night arrested 21-year-old Fernando Joseph Valdez. Police and prosecutors alleged that Valdez and the teen had driven into the parking lot, turned around, and fired several shots at Berholtz and his companions, believing that someone associated with the area had stolen drugs from them. Both suspects were booked into custody on $1 million bond each and were charged with murder in Berholtz's death and attempted murder in the shooting of the surviving woman. Subsequent case summaries list the homicide as “solved,” reflecting that arrests were made and charges filed against the identified suspects.
