The Case of the Grim Tweaker

He steps over to Dave Uribe's patrol car, which is on the access road exactly where the officer parked it, and looks in. Uribe's last message about the stolen license plates still is visible on the police cruiser's computer screen.

Uribe's gun belt lies twisted on the pavement maybe 15 feet east of the patrol car, near a gold ballpoint pen and a pair of sunglasses. (Other cops already had taken Uribe's gun out of its holster and put it in a safe place.)

A jagged pool of the officer's coagulating blood glistens beneath the midday sun.

"Guy never had a chance," Detective Femenia says.

Speaking about the shooter and his accomplice, he adds, "At 10 o'clock this morning, there was a future for those folks. Well, there's still a future, but it's not going to be what they had in mind. In our society, you just don't want to hurt little kids or cops."

He pauses, and takes a last drag on his Marlboro.

"Okay, let's go."

Femenia soon walks four eyewitnesses into the scene, one by one and out of earshot of each other.

One is Elsie Hart, a woman in her 60s who was driving by when a man shot the officer.

Says Hart, "I saw him pull out the gun and, bang, bang, bang!"

Then she volunteers something that stops Femenia short.

"I think it was the passenger who shot the officer when he reached across the driver. I can see the gun. . . . I'm sure it was the passenger."

Yet a street cop who spoke to Hart minutes after the shooting reports that she'd fingered the driver, not the passenger.

One of these stories is wrong, and Femenia well knows the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. But after having heard Hart's account firsthand, the detective has to put his money on the passenger.

Over at John C. Lincoln Hospital, Dave Uribe's family and squad mates are keeping vigil.

Uribe has suffered devastating gunshot wounds from close range to the top of his forehead, upper lip and neck.

At 3:50 p.m., he is pronounced dead.

Though the officers at the scene have been expecting this, the news is jolting.

The investigation now is officially a murder case.

Minutes earlier, Detective Caruso had told Sergeant Kotecki about a possibly significant find during his search of the Monte Carlo.

Inside, he'd found a receipt from a Denny's restaurant at 35th Avenue and Bethany Home Road. It's dated the previous day, in the late afternoon.

The receipt also specifies the table number and server.

Just maybe, the image of the killer and his accomplice will appear on the restaurant's security tapes.

Kotecki asks Detective Jesus Jimenez to drive over to the Denny's and take a look.

There, Jimenez strikes potential gold.

One camera has captured two men paying a waitress at a cash register during the relevant time frame. Another camera shows the men with three other guys and a woman at the table noted on the receipt.

Jimenez rushes the tapes, actually CDs, to the crime scene shortly before 5 p.m.

The two men at the cash register fit the description, however general it still is, of the possible murder suspects.

The investigators want to get enhanced still photos of the Denny's customers to the media as soon as possible.

The photos make it onto the 6 p.m. TV news.

A Phoenix woman named Corinne Powell calls Phoenix police about 4:30 on the afternoon of the murder.

What she reveals is compelling enough for Detective Mark Middleton to ask her for an immediate in-person interview.

He comes by her home just after 5.

She tells Middleton that her 21-year-old daughter, Jena Sedillo, had been in the Monte Carlo shortly before the Uribe shooting.

And Jena also has told her mom that an 18-year-old friend named Donnie Delahanty had been talking for days about shooting any cop who pulled him over.

Powell says she'd seen Donnie and another friend of Jena's named Chris Wilson about 10:30 a.m., when they'd dropped off Jena and her boyfriend Matt Watson at Powell's west Phoenix office.

Their car looked like the Monte Carlo that already was on the news, Powell says.

The men had promised to return within an hour, but hadn't shown up.

In the early afternoon, Powell and her daughter had heard over the news about the shooting of an officer on Cactus Road, and about an abandoned Monte Carlo.

She tells Middleton that, about 2:30 p.m., Jena had used her cell phone to call an acquaintance named Dave.

Dave told Jena that the descriptions of the suspects in the car sounded like Donnie and Chris.

Jena told her mother that she'd seen Donnie cleaning a silver gun the previous evening, and that he'd repeated a vow to kill a cop if he got pulled over.

Powell says she dropped off her daughter and Matt Watson near a friend's apartment shortly after Jena's phone call to Dave.

Detective Middleton retrieves the numbers that Jena called from Powell's cell phone.

He phones Dave at 6:30 p.m.

Dave says he is David Sammy York, a 41-year-old Arizona Department of Corrections officer. But, no, he doesn't know a Jena, Chris or Donnie.