Javier Lorenzano Nunez spent close to a year locked up, first in a Mexican prison, then in Maricopa County Jail, for a 1998 Phoenix murder he says he did not commit. The arrest hinged on a facial recognition hit. The case fell apart after DNA and fingerprint evidence excluded him. Now he is suing the people who put him there.
Lorenzano Nunez has filed a federal lawsuit against the Phoenix Police Department and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, alleging false arrest, false imprisonment, gross negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and defamation. Both agencies declined to comment on the suit, ABC15 reported.
The lawsuit lays out a timeline that should trouble anyone who believes law enforcement must meet a basic standard of diligence before it strips a person of his liberty. What emerges is not a story of dogged detective work cracking a cold case. It is a story of investigators who ignored leads, bypassed exculpatory forensic evidence they already had in hand, and leaned on a technology that returned 250 possible matches, then picked one man and ran with it.
A 1998 murder and a suspect who vanished
On July 9, 1998, just before midnight, 28-year-old Sarah Carr was shot and killed at a house near 14th Street and McDowell Road in Phoenix following an argument. Witnesses identified Gilbert Noel Sanchez Rosado as the suspect. He fled and was never found.
The case sat cold for years. Then, in 2007, the Puerto Rico Police Department contacted Phoenix police with a significant break: they had a man in custody with the same name, date of birth, and social security number as Rosado. Puerto Rico requested a photograph and fingerprints from Phoenix.
Phoenix police, the lawsuit alleges, did nothing with that information.
Danny Ortega, the civil rights attorney representing Lorenzano Nunez, put it bluntly:
"They did not act on it. That was the problem. They did nothing with the information that was given to them by the Puerto Rican Authorities."
That 2007 lead, a man matching the original suspect's name, birthdate, and Social Security number, already in law enforcement custody, went nowhere. The lawsuit does not explain why. Neither does Phoenix PD, which declined to comment.
Fingerprints that should have ended it
The trail to Lorenzano Nunez began separately. In 2011, he was arrested in San Diego following a domestic disturbance and eventually deported to Mexico. Phoenix investigators obtained his fingerprints from that arrest and submitted them for testing against latent prints from the 1998 crime scene.
The results came back in 2017. They excluded Lorenzano Nunez on two latent prints. The other two were inconclusive.
That was seven years before anyone showed up to arrest him for murder.
Think about that sequence. By 2017, Phoenix police had forensic results in their own files showing this man's fingerprints did not match the crime scene. They arrested him anyway in 2024. The lawsuit states plainly that police knew Lorenzano Nunez's fingerprints did not match years before his arrest.
Accountability failures inside police departments are not unique to Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., more than a dozen officers were placed on leave as a probe into manipulated crime statistics widened, another case where internal checks failed to catch institutional problems before they compounded.
250 matches, one arrest
Roughly two decades after the killing, investigators ran Rosado's old Arizona Motor Vehicle Division photo through facial recognition databases operated by the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the FBI. The system returned 250 possible matches.
Out of that haystack, investigators zeroed in on Lorenzano Nunez.
The lawsuit does not detail what additional evidence, if any, linked him to the crime beyond the facial recognition hit. Court motions filed by defense attorneys stated that investigators could not find proof Lorenzano Nunez had ever been to Arizona. His fingerprints did not match the crime scene. And yet the case moved forward.
Cold case detective Dominick Roestenberg brought the case to a grand jury. The lawsuit alleges, and states that the court found, that Roestenberg misled the grand jury to obtain the indictment against Lorenzano Nunez. Whether Roestenberg has faced any disciplinary or legal consequences for that finding remains unclear.
When police misconduct allegations surface, the question of institutional accountability looms large. In Minneapolis, a police chief was forced out after tampering with an investigation into his own conduct, a reminder that the culture inside a department determines whether bad decisions get caught or covered.
The arrest Phoenix celebrated
Phoenix police did not treat the arrest as routine. They issued a press release. They produced a special video about the case. They flew in Garrett Miller, Sarah Carr's son and a police officer in Texas, for the arrest. Miller's own handcuffs were used during the bust.
It was a made-for-media moment built on what the lawsuit calls a case without probable cause.
Lorenzano Nunez, who had been living in Mexico, was held in a Mexican prison awaiting extradition. He was then transferred to Maricopa County Jail. Combined, he spent nearly a year behind bars.
Less than a year after the arrest, all charges were dismissed. The forensic evidence, DNA and fingerprints, excluded him. The case that Phoenix police had publicized with a victim's son and a pair of symbolic handcuffs simply collapsed.
Ortega, Lorenzano Nunez's attorney, framed the core problem in an earlier interview:
"I represent an individual who never should have been arrested. This was a look-alike case, which is not sufficient for an arrest or to keep a man in jail for a whole year."
What the lawsuit demands, and what it leaves open
The federal lawsuit alleges that Phoenix police and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office committed gross negligence, false arrest, false imprisonment, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and defamation. It alleges Lorenzano Nunez was arrested without probable cause.
The specific damages sought and the federal court where the suit was filed have not been publicly disclosed in available reporting. Neither has the precise date of the lawsuit's filing.
Several questions remain unanswered. What happened to the man Puerto Rico police had in custody in 2007, the one who shared Rosado's name, birthdate, and Social Security number? Where is the original suspect, Gilbert Noel Sanchez Rosado, today? What DNA evidence was tested, and what exactly did it show? Has detective Roestenberg faced any consequences for what the court found was misleading testimony before a grand jury?
Cases involving disputed police conduct and decades-old claims raise difficult procedural questions. A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against Sioux City police in part because the claims had expired over two decades, a reminder that the legal system sometimes closes the door on old grievances regardless of their merit.
Phoenix PD and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office have offered no public defense. They have not explained why the 2007 Puerto Rico lead was ignored, why the 2017 fingerprint exclusion did not end the investigation, or why a facial recognition match from a pool of 250 candidates was treated as sufficient grounds to arrest, extradite, and jail a man for nearly a year.
Allegations of institutional failure within law enforcement are not confined to any single department or region. In San Diego, a federal officer has alleged that police covered up an assault to protect the department's image, a pattern that erodes the public trust every officer depends on.
The real cost
Facial recognition technology is a tool, nothing more. It can narrow a search. It cannot establish guilt. When investigators treat a machine-generated resemblance as a substitute for actual evidence, the results are predictable. Someone who looks like someone else goes to prison.
Lorenzano Nunez lost nearly a year of his life. He sat in a Mexican jail cell, then a Maricopa County cell, for a crime committed before some of the technology used to accuse him even existed. The fingerprints that cleared him had been in police files for seven years before anyone bothered to arrest him.
Sarah Carr's family deserves justice. Her son deserved a real answer, not a press conference built on a facial recognition guess. And Javier Lorenzano Nunez deserved something the system is supposed to guarantee before it locks a man in a cage: probable cause.
When law enforcement skips the hard work of building a real case and leans on technology it doesn't fully understand, the innocent pay the price, and the guilty stay free.
