Julian De Luna died after being shot in the early hours of January 18, 1929, in Morenci, Arizona. He was a male of Hispanic / Latino ethnicity whose exact age is not specified in the available public records. He lived in a household connected to the copper-mining camp at Morenci and shared the home with relatives, including his fellow uncle, Pedro Ornelas, and their niece Paula Medina.
Contemporary accounts and later summaries describe Paula as the focus of persistent, unwanted attention from a local miner, Refugio Macias, whose escalating harassment and violence ultimately led to the shooting that claimed Julian’s life.
In the months and years before the killing, Macias had lived in Morenci for four to five years and had repeatedly tried to force his attentions on Paula, pressing her to marry him despite her clear rejection. Paula and her family had told him many times to leave her alone, and her sister at the Delgada household again ordered him to stop bothering Paula on the evening before the homicide. That night, in the business district of Morenci, he accosted Paula in the street, followed her as she spoke with her recognized sweetheart, Antonio Lerma, and then trailed her back to the home of her brother-in-law, Cipriano Delgada, where Paula was staying. Inside that house, Julian and Pedro were sleeping in a downstairs room, part of an extended family arrangement typical of mining-camp housing of the period.
Macias’ behavior that evening quickly turned violent. Around 9 p.m., after being told again to stay away from Paula, he encountered Delgada and Lerma in front of a social club in Morenci and suddenly opened fire on them, wounding Lerma with a revolver shot and sending another bullet through Delgada’s coat. Local officers began searching for him, but he hid at a friend’s home and was not immediately found. Later, after his first attempt to force his way into the Delgada house that night, he left a packed suitcase with a friend, telling the friend that if he did not return for it he would send for it—behavior later cited by authorities as evidence that he was preparing to flee after carrying out his intentions.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on January 18, 1929, Macias returned to the Delgada residence and began pounding on the doors and windows, demanding entry. His banging and attempts to force open the door and windows frightened the women inside; Paula and her sister screamed, and Paula specifically asked Julian and Pedro—who slept in a lower room in the house—to go upstairs and drive him away. The two uncles hastily dressed and stepped out onto the front porch to confront the intruder. On the porch, after a brief exchange, Macias fired at least three shots at them. One shot struck Pedro fatally, killing him almost instantly and knocking him from the porch; another mortally wounded Julian, who was able to retreat back into the interior of the house before succumbing to his injuries. Some summaries frame their actions as an act of courage—rushing upstairs in the middle of the night to protect their niece and her sister from a man whose violence and fixation they already knew too well.
After the shootings, Macias left the scene on foot. Within roughly an hour, sheriff’s deputies apprehended him on the road between Morenci and the nearby town of Clifton at about 3 a.m. He still carried the pistol that investigators identified as the weapon used to shoot Julian and Pedro. During questioning, he claimed that Julian and Pedro had attacked him with knives on the porch, that he first fired a shot into the floor to scare them back, and then fired once at each of them in what he portrayed as self-defense when they allegedly continued to advance and cornered him. However, prosecutors argued that he had formed a premeditated intent to kill anyone who interfered with his pursuit of Paula and that his conduct throughout the day and night—harassing Paula, shooting at Lerma and Delgada, attempting forced entry multiple times, and preparing a suitcase—showed a deliberate plan rather than a spontaneous struggle.
The case against Macias moved swiftly through the Arizona courts. He was charged with the murders of Julian De Luna and Pedro Ornelas, tried in Greenlee County, and convicted of first-degree murder after the jury rejected his self-defense account in favor of the state’s theory of calculated, jealous violence. His conviction and death sentence were affirmed on appeal, and his last-minute effort to have the punishment reduced to life imprisonment was denied. On March 7, 1930, at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, Macias was executed by hanging for the killings that had taken place at the Delgada home in Morenci. No other suspects were ever reported or charged; the investigation and subsequent legal proceedings identified Refugio Macias as the sole perpetrator responsible for the gunshot wounds that ended Julian De Luna’s life.
