PHOENIX — A former Arizona Cardinals football player says police wrongfully targeted him as a shooting suspect.
Wesley Leasy, 53, said he was picking up his daughter from Sky Harbor Airport when they were surrounded at gunpoint, forced to lie on the ground, and handcuffed.
Leasy played linebacker for the Arizona Cardinals from 1995 to 1996. He runs a Scottsdale construction company, and he ran for state legislature in 2022.
On April 10, Leasy had been circling Terminal 3 for 20 minutes while waiting for his adult daughter to come out of baggage claim. He was driving a new white Mercedes with temporary tags.
"I greet her," Leasy said. "I pick up her bag to put in my trunk."
Then he hears yelling to put his hands up and get on the ground.
"It looks like machine guns are out," Leasy said. "All these barrels, and they’re all pointed at us and he’s barking orders out."
They were surrounded by at least 10 officers from three jurisdictions who had been following him around the airport.
"I actually thought that I could die, but I actually thought that my daughter was going to get shot because she was crying hysterically," Leasy said.
A Mesa Police Department spokeswoman told ABC15 there had been a shooting minutes earlier near Country Club Drive and Brown Road. At the city's Real Time Crime Center, traffic camera video near the scene showed a car that witnesses described. It was a white Mercedes with four doors, a sunroof, and a temporary, paper license plate.
A police helicopter followed the suspect vehicle westbound on the Loop 202 but lost sight of it near the airport. Four minutes later, Leasy's white Mercedes, which matched the description of the suspect's car, was spotted.
Leasy described the police search operation as "botched."
"The whole thing just seemed to me - bad resources, bad communication, bad policing," Leasy said.
Leasy and his daughter were detained for less than five minutes before the officers removed the handcuffs. Police said they later arrested a suspect in the case, who was described as a white man.
Civil rights attorney Benjamin Taylor is representing Leasy.
"A lightbulb should’ve popped in their head like, 'Hey, maybe this is not the right person,'" Taylor said. He questions why responding officers weren't able to get more specific information about the shooter's description as they repeatedly circled the airport.
"There’s no probable cause or reasonable suspicion to pull Wesley over," Taylor said. "There are tons of white Mercedes that are driving around the Valley each and every day, and to say, 'that’s our only reason' doesn’t make any sense to pull him over."
Mesa police declined an on-camera interview, but a spokesperson said officers decided to detain Leasy because he got out of the car and they didn't want a possible shooting suspect to get inside the busy airport terminal.
"I’d like to know how things went so bad. I want some accountability and responsibility," Leasy said.
A Mesa police sergeant at the airport did apologize to Leasy as he explained how the mix-up occurred.
