In the late hours of a September evening in 1996, a senseless act of violence cut short the life of 16-year-old Jonathan Bria in west Phoenix. The young man was a passenger in a Nissan truck with a group of friends, having just left an Arizona State University football party. They were on their way to a Taco Bell when a traffic altercation escalated into a fatal encounter.
A man in another vehicle, a 1979 Chevrolet El Camino, opened fire on the truckload of friends.
One of the bullets fired into the vehicle struck Jonathan Bria. The single gunshot wound to his left flank proved to be devastating, causing extensive internal injuries. He was rushed to Phoenix General Hospital and then airlifted to Good Samaritan Hospital, but he ultimately succumbed to his injuries during surgery. An autopsy would later confirm that he bled to death internally as the bullet had torn through several vital organs. Two other individuals in the truck also sustained gunshot wounds but survived.
For a time, the identity of the shooter remained a mystery to law enforcement, who only had a description of a Hispanic male known by the street name 'Dopey.' The dogged persistence of a Phoenix police detective eventually led to the identification of the suspect as Tony Aguilar. By the time he was apprehended in El Paso, Texas, in July of 1997, Aguilar had committed other violent crimes.
Tony Aguilar, who was also 16 at the time of the shooting, was tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of Jonathan Bria. The jury found him guilty, and he was ultimately sentenced to death by lethal injection for the crime. Prior to his trial for Bria's murder, Aguilar was already serving a life sentence for the unrelated murders of a couple in west Phoenix that occurred just two weeks after he killed Jonathan Bria.
