In the early morning hours of September 13, 2022, a sense of unease lingered for 28-year-old Jose Arriaga, a Hispanic man from Hartford, Connecticut. Just an hour before his death, he reached out to a friend in a hurried phone call, his words laced with fear. He claimed that a man he knew as "Juicy" had just shot at him on Williams Street but had missed.
That phone call would later become a critical piece of the investigation into his final moments.
Around 1 a.m., the Hartford Police Department's ShotSpotter system detected multiple gunshots in the vicinity of the 300 block of Hillside Avenue. As officers were dispatched to the scene, another call came in reporting a car crash just a short distance away. Responders arrived to find a vehicle that had crashed into parked cars. Inside, they discovered Jose Arriaga, unresponsive and suffering from several gunshot wounds to his torso. He was rushed to a local hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.
The investigation that followed pieced together a chilling sequence of events. Detectives utilized surveillance footage from the area which showed a Ford Taurus and a Jeep Cherokee arriving and parking on Hillside Avenue. A man, later identified by police as 45-year-old Donald Parker, known as "Juicy," exited the Taurus while another man got out of the Jeep. Moments later, Arriaga pulled up in his Infiniti. The two men approached his vehicle, and within seconds, as Arriaga began to drive away, they opened fire. The investigation determined that the gunshot wounds caused Arriaga to lose control of his car and crash.
Based on Arriaga's own words to his friend, witness statements, ballistic evidence, and the surveillance footage that captured the fatal encounter, authorities identified Donald Parker as the primary suspect. The Ford Taurus seen in the video was registered in his name. More than two months after the shooting, on November 28, 2022, members of the Hartford Police Department and U.S. Marshals located Parker at a residence in East Hartford and took him into custody without incident. He was subsequently charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and criminal possession of a firearm, and was held on a $1.5 million bond.
