Two 16-year-olds tied to a crime spree, including two Arizona murders
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Phoenix, AZ (KPHO/KTVK) — A string of crimes with a number of victims across the Valley has been tied to a pair of young suspects. Police accuse the teenagers of murdering two people during a two-month crime spree.
The suspects in the case are only 16 years old. One of them was 15 when this all started. Their long list of charges includes kidnapping, assault and murder.
“These are very violent crimes to strangers,” said Greg Bacon, a detective with Tempe Police Department. “It kind of started in Phoenix. There was an aggravated assault. They were near a Circle K where they shot a random person, and there is some surveillance footage.”
Police asked departments across the Valley to look out for the suspects.
“A few short days later, we had a homicide in Tempe,” said Bacon. “As our detectives were going through the info on that homicide, they found there was a photo, and one of our detectives looked at that photo and said, ‘Hey, this kind of looks like one of the same people involved in that Phoenix shooting.'”
Detectives say they linked Corbin McNeil and James Quintero to the death and the Circle K shooting. They were arrested, and court records stamped in October accuse the teenagers of several other crimes, including murdering another person in Chandler. Several victims are listed in records, but documents show Matthew Meisner and Amber Joy Patton as the victims who died.
“Hopefully, help some families through the healing process now, as they lost loved ones,” said Bacon. “These were stranger victims. They weren’t known to either one of these individuals. They were heinous, egregious, extremely violent crimes, and the community can be happy these two individuals are off the street.”
“This is not just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” said Travis Webb, a licensed clinical social worker. “There’s enough evidence of an ongoing, repeated behavior of destruction or violence.”
Webb looked at court records, trying to figure out how two guys, so young, could be responsible for crimes, so horrifying.
“This is a very underdeveloped brain in best-case scenario, and this is a brain that probably has spent a lot of time developing with a lot of very skewed concepts of what human interaction, human relation really is,” said Webb.
Police said the teenagers are being charged as adults.
Their bonds are set at $1.5 million dollars.
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