Pima County can't be sued in deadly Tucson eviction, court rules

The family of a woman who was killed in a mass shooting during an eviction at the Tucson apartment complex she managed can no longer proceed with their lawsuit against Pima County, the Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled.

Angela Heath-Fox, 28, accompanied constable Deborah Martinez-Garibay in August 2022 for the eviction of Gavin Lee Stansell, 24, from his residence at Lind Commons, an apartment complex near East Fort Lowell Road and North Dodge Boulevard.

Stansell opened fire, killing Heath-Fox, Martinez-Garibay and Elijah Miranda, a 25-year-old bystander, before turning the gun on himself.

In March 2023, the family of Heath-Fox filed a $50 million claim seeking damages against Martinez-Garibay’s estate and the county. Also named in the claim was the Pima County Board of Supervisors, the Pima County Constable’s Office, the Pima County Attorney’s Office and the Arizona Constable Ethics, Standards and Training Board.

In a Feb. 14 ruling, the Arizona Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that allowed the case to proceed against the county. The ruling, blocking the lawsuit against the county, cites judicial immunity for both the county and Martinez-Garibay.

While the previous ruling “was correct to conclude that legislative immunity does not protect” the Pima County Board of Supervisors’ decision to appoint Martinez-Garibay, it “erred, however, by finding that the constable’s acts in service of (an eviction notice) were not protected by judicial immunity,” Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Christopher O’Neil said in the ruling.

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“Although the law assigns responsibility for appointment of constables to county boards of supervisors under limited circumstances, there is nothing uniquely legislative in the act of appointing a person to fill a vacant office,” O’Neil wrote. “We conclude that service of a writ is necessarily a judicial function, closely tied to the judicial decision to issue the writ in the first place... It is, therefore, protected by the doctrine of judicial immunity.”

David Abney, who is representing the family of Heath-Fox, said they plan to file a “petition for review” with the Arizona Supreme Court, which he says the court can choose whether or not to take on.

“This issue is really very simple: do you read the plain word of the statute and enforce them?” Abney told the Star on Friday.

“The statute says that a constable is liable for any misconduct while serving an eviction notice if that conduct injures somebody. And here, the conduct resulted in the deaths of three people,” Abney said. “So, the plain words are what you’re supposed to enforce, and the Court of Appeals is not doing that. It’s going out of his way not to enforce the plain words of the statute, which is wrong.”

Abney said the petition to the Arizona Supreme Court is of principle and that there’s “nothing sophisticated about it.”

“The whole point of the petition review to the Supreme Court is to say, ‘if we have a principle that if a statute is plain on its face, you enforce the plain words,” he said. “You don’t do anything else. You don’t go look anywhere else. You enforce the plain words.”