AURORA, Colo. — Two 18-year-olds were arrested on Monday in connection with a road rage-related shooting that left a father dead in Aurora on June 5.
SWAT officers with the Aurora Police Department arrested Juan Carlos Rivas-Luna and Aracely Enriquez, who are both 18 years old and live in Aurora. Rivas-Luna faces one charge of first-degree murder and Enriquez faces one charge of accessory to first-degree murder. They were arrested along the 1000 block of Hanover Street.
The arrests came one week after the shooting.
Just before 10 p.m. on June 5, officers responded to a report of a shooting along S. Havana Street near E. Idaho Place in the Dayton Triangle neighborhood.
According to the arrest affidavits for the two suspects, police found a GMC Envoy stopped and facing southbound at the scene. They saw a man on the ground next to the driver's side of the car who appeared to have a gunshot wound to his chest. Aurora police began CPR until Aurora Fire Department personnel arrived and took over. The man was not responsive. He was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced deceased at 10:26 p.m., police said.
The Arapahoe County Coroner's Office identified him as 48-year-old Stephen Dennis Qualls. He had been driving the car.
Meanwhile, police at the scene spoke with the car's front-seat passenger, who was the significant other of Qualls. She is referred to as Witness 1 in this story. There were also two young children and Qualls' father in the car.
Witness 1 told police they were headed southbound on S. Havana Street approaching the intersection with E. Mississippi Avenue when a red or maroon SUV pulled between them and another vehicle, causing Qualls to swerve to avoid a collision. That driver then continued south, according to the affidavit.
Farther down the road, both vehicles stopped at a red light at E. Idaho Place and S. Havana Street. According to the affidavit, Qualls opened his car window and asked the driver of the maroon SUV if he was OK. The person in the SUV's passenger seat rolled their window down about two inches, enough so that Witness 1 could see that a Hispanic male between 20 and 30 years old was driving the car and a Hispanic female was in the front passenger seat.
Witness 1 said Qualls said something along the lines of warning the driver that what he had done farther back on the road was not safe. She said one of the people in the SUV must have said something because Qualls said, "What? I cannot hear you" and stepped out of the GMC to talk with the people in the maroon SUV, according to the affidavit.
Witness 1 said she couldn't hear their conversation, but saw the driver force his female passenger back against her seat and heard a gunshot. The front passenger side window of the maroon SUV shattered. Qualls fell to the ground.
Witness 1 said she never saw a gun.
The driver of the maroon SUV began speeding southbound on S. Havana Street as Witness 1 called for help and tried to keep Qualls awake. Qualls' father called 911, according to the affidavit.
After Qualls had been transported to the hospital, police analyzed the scene. They noticed the broken glass but saw the GMC's windows were intact. Officers did not find any guns or casings at the scene.
Police did locate a pair of pants with suspected blood on them next to the driver's side of the GMC. This was not mentioned again in the affidavits.
While some officers canvassed the area, others checked the city's traffic cameras. They spotted a red or maroon Ford- or Mercury-style car headed southbound through the S. Havana Street and E. Mississippi Avenue intersection at 9:50 p.m., prior to the shooting, according to the affidavit. They watched as the video showed how the driver forced Qualls' car to veer out of his lane temporarily.
Officers noted that the SUV had a tan trim and the rear passenger window appeared to be taped or boarded up. A Be On the Lookout (BOLO) Alert was issued for the maroon SUV.
During an interview with police, Witness 1 said she and Qualls had celebrated his new job at a dinner and picked up the children afterward. She said she didn't notice the suspect vehicle until the drivers interacted at E. Mississippi Avenue and S. Havana Street, according to the affidavit.
Qualls' father, who has a developmental disability, was unable to recall anything other than that his son had been shot.
On June 6, the Arapahoe County Coroner's Office concluded that Qualls had died of a single gunshot wound to the chest. His death was officially ruled a homicide. The bullet was recovered during the autopsy and given to police, according to the affidavit.
Witness 1 gave police consent to search the GMC, which happened the same day. Investigators found shards of glass on the driver's side floorboard, but again saw no broken windows on the car. The glass pieces were collected as evidence, according to the affidavit.
That day, a sergeant assigned to APD's gang unit located the suspect SUV in front of a home along N. Hanover Street in Aurora. Both the rear driver's side window and front passenger side window appeared new and much cleaner than the other windows, according to the affidavit. A non-glass part of the window, called a B pillar, appeared to have damage consistent with a bullet hole, the document reads. The vehicle was a red 2010 Ford Explorer.
A sergeant with APD's Major Crimes Homicide Unit said the car was parked in front of the home of a known gang member — Juan Carlos Rivas-Luna. He is known to carry guns and has been involved in violent crimes in Aurora, according to the affidavit.
Police used the license plate to determine who the car belonged to.
They began to tow the car from the scene. As they did this, Rivas-Luna and his girlfriend Aracely Enriquez, walked up to them. Rivas-Luna said the car was his girlfriend's and later said it was his mother's, but his girlfriend drives it. He said he never drove it, according to the affidavit.
Rivas-Luna asked if it was being towed "because of the shooting on Mississippi Ave.," to which an officer said he did not know the details, according to the affidavit. The 18-year-old responded that somebody told him police were looking for a vehicle like that one and he had seen it on the news.
Enriquez denied driving the car on June 5 and denied that her boyfriend ever drove it. However, APD's license plate reader system captured the car traveling twice on June 5 in Aurora, according to the affidavit.
The car was registered to her mother.
Both Rivas-Luna and Enriquez gave their phone numbers to police. At this time, Rivas-Luna was on probation within the 18th Judicial District Attorney's Office for three juvenile weapon offense cases, but did not have any active arrest warrants.
The following day, June 7, officers spoke with Enriquez's mother, who owned the Ford Explorer, but allowed her daughter to use it. The mother said the car was broken into a few months prior and a window had been taped closed since. She did not know about any other broken windows.
The mother said Enriquez lived with Rivas-Luna and his family, but she spoke to her daughter frequently. She said she did not like her boyfriend and did not know if he drove the car, according to the affidavit.
Authorities also executed a search warrant on the Ford Explorer on June 7. During this, they discovered:
- The driver's side had paint chipping and the color was faded and dull
- The rear driver's side window had tape residue stuck around the window
- The window that appeared to be previously taped up now had a clean glass window
- The driver's side front quarter panel and hood were gray, which matched the vehicle seen in Aurora camera surveillance from Havana Street and 6th Avenue
- Shards of glass were stuck in the exterior of the windshield near the top left corner (glass was recovered as evidence)
- More glass was along the bottom of the windshield under the wipers
- More glass was found on the passenger-side floorboards
- The front passenger-side window appeared to have been recently replaced or cleaned
- The car seemed to have been recently wiped down and vacuumed
- A defect in the passenger side front B pillar was consistent with a bullet fired from within the car to the outside
Meanwhile, other officers attended an interview with one of the young children who was in the car at the time of the shooting. From this, they learned that one was the biological daughter of Qualls, according to the affidavit. She referred to Witness 1 as her mom, though Witness 1 was not her biological mother. The child recalled another car almost crashing into them and her dad honking at them. She said when both cars stopped, the male driver of the other car shot her dad, according to the affidavit. She said her father wasn't holding anything when he was shot.
According to the affidavit, she remembered getting out of the car after the suspect vehicle left, and seeing her dad on the ground. She said Witness 1 yelled for help and while there were other people in the area, nobody stepped in to help — "they just stared," she said.
That same day — June 7 — a Arapahoe County deputy with the Regional Anti-Violence Enforcement Network (RAVEN) told investigators he was part of an open homicide investigation from 2021 in which Rivas-Luna was believed to be the shooter. He said there were multiple other shootings he believed Rivas-Luna was involved in around the Denver metro area. The deputy was also familiar with Enriquez, and knew the two communicated mostly through Facebook messages. There was no other mention about possible future charges against Rivas-Luna in connection with any other crimes.
Four days after the shooting, on June 9, investigators were able to look at phone call records, including location data, from Enriquez's phone between 9:15 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. on June 5, according to the affidavit. The data from these records lined up with the movements of the maroon SUV that evening.
Three days later, authorities were able to look at Rivas-Luna's cell phone records from the same timeframe. It matched the movements of Enriquez's phone and the maroon SUV.
Based on the witness interviews and evidence gathered, police said they believe Rivas-Luna was driving the car with Enriquez in the passenger seat, and he fired a single shot out of the passenger side window, hitting Qualls in the chest and killing him, the affidavit reads.
"Juan (Rivas-Luna) used universal malice, manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life when he knowing(ly) shot across Aracely's (Enriquez) body out a glass window toward Stephen (Qualls) and the other passengers in Stephen's vehicle, which included two young children and two additional adults," the affidavit reads.
The affidavit for Enriquez reads that she "lied to officers about her whereabouts and the Ford Explorer's location at the time of the shooting."
Both of them were arrested — Rivas-Luna on a charge of first-degree murder and Enriquez on a charge of accessory to first-degree murder.
Anybody who has information on this case is asked to call Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867.
