Thursday, May 9, 2013
The late summer and early fall of 2010 were some of the bloodiest Tucson has seen in terms of homicides. Believe me, I spent a lot of time covering and tweeting about it while working for another publication.
It got so bad during a five-week stretch (roughly Aug. 8-Sept. 10, 2010), with at least 21 reported homicides within the city limits, that Tucson police PIOs had started referring to the last workday of the week as Homicide Fridays because nearly every one began with them and us cop reporters rendezvousing at a deadly crime scene.
Most of those homicides were solved almost immediately, or not long after they were committed. Some of the assailants have been convicted and are already serving time.
But the death of at least one victim, 36-year-old Darwin Wells, had gone unsolved for more than a year-and-a-half until TPD announced Thursday it had arrested Gunnar Quick, 37, the night before in connection with that homicide.
Wells was found dead in the parking lot of the Sunflower Apartments on Golf Links near Wilmot around 2 a.m. on Aug. 27, and for a long time TPD had no clue who was involved in his death. That changed last November, according to a press release, and ultimately that led to Quick's arrest.
Those few weeks in 2010 were some tense ones around Tucson, with people trying to explain the sudden upswing in killings. Good to see that, even after all this time, police are still working to take an (alleged) killer off the street.