PHOENIX — Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said Wednesday that her team is “moving as quickly as we can” as prosecutors face public pressure to file criminal charges in October's deadly beating of 16-year-old Preston Lord.
“We have devoted an extraordinary amount of resources to this,” said Mitchell at her bi-weekly press conference.
The investigation of Lord’s attack outside a suburban Queen Creek Halloween party attracted national media attention after East Valley moms’ social media sleuthing raised awareness about the attack and possible suspects.
“I think it also strikes to the heart of so many parents,” Mitchell said when asked about the fascination with the case. “They send their kid to a Halloween party — what they think is a Halloween party — and he dies. And it's heartbreaking.”
Queen Creek police turned over the names of seven suspects, multiple witness statements, and hundreds of videos and other pieces of digital evidence.
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“The police cannot just pull off videos or have video sent to them, and just say, ‘Okay, here's the evidence, here's the picture of what happened, we can just use this,”’ Mitchell said.
Mitchell explained photos and videos can only be used in a trial to convict someone if they can meet the criteria to be admitted into evidence.
The county attorney explained she has to be able to put someone on the witness stand to say, “This is the video I took,” or, “I've reviewed the video, I saw what happened, and the video is an accurate reflection of what happened.”
Mitchell was also asked whether any of the teens recently arrested in other Southeast Valley violent attacks could also be involved in Lord's death.
“I'm not prepared to say that at this point,” Mitchell said. “There may be some overlap, but I want to look at everything before I definitively say one way or the other.”
So far, there have been no arrests nor criminal charges in the Lord homicide case.
The county attorney did not provide a timeline for when a prosecutorial decision will be made.
