An 18-year-old Tucson man has been sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison after admitting he fled the scene of a crash that killed 75-year-old Sally Alcaraz Rodriguez, a grandmother who relatives said was walking to a bus stop when she was struck last fall.
The sentence closed the trial-court phase of a case that drew sharp anger from Rodriguez’s family because the defendant was not charged with causing her death. Instead, prosecutors said the evidence supported a felony count of leaving the scene of a crash resulting in death or serious injury. That distinction shaped everything that followed, from the plea to the prison term, and left Rodriguez’s relatives using the sentencing hearing to press the point that a woman they describe as the center of a large family died in the street and deserved a stronger response.
The case began on Nov. 3, 2025, when Tucson police were called at about 7 p.m. to the 200 block of West Tennessee Street on the city’s south side. Officers found Rodriguez unresponsive in the roadway, and Tucson Fire Department personnel pronounced her dead at the scene. Investigators said her injuries were consistent with being struck by a vehicle, but the evidence suggested that the collision itself may have happened somewhere else. Police later said Rodriguez had been dropped off in the 200 block of West Tennessee Street, where she was found. Personal property believed to belong to her turned up farther west, near South Liberty Avenue and West Kentucky Street, adding another piece to a timeline that was never fully settled in public. In the months after her death, daughter Mary Rodriguez Romero described the loss in court and on local television in deeply personal terms. “To our family, she is everything,” Romero said. “She is the heart of our family tree.”
Investigators eventually tied the case to Alexis Eduardo Ibarra-Guerrero, then 18, after a tip and dashboard-camera evidence helped focus the search. Court records described video showing a Chevrolet Camaro and a college-age male hunched over the victim’s body after the crash. A records check led detectives to the registered owner of a 2010 Camaro, who told police he had been in the process of selling the car to Ibarra-Guerrero. According to the interim complaint described by local outlets, that owner said Ibarra-Guerrero confessed that he had hit Rodriguez. Investigators also said the victim remained on the hood of the vehicle before she was left in the roadway. The car had damage consistent with a pedestrian strike, and DNA evidence supported the conclusion that a person had been on the hood, according to local reporting on the complaint. Tucson police said Ibarra-Guerrero turned himself in 10 days after the crash. He was booked on one count of failure to remain at the scene of a fatal collision, a class 2 felony.
That charging decision became the most contested part of the case. The Pima County Attorney’s Office told 13 News that investigators had no evidence the crash itself was anything more than an accident. Because of that, prosecutors did not bring a homicide count and instead pursued the case around what happened after impact: the stop, the departure and the failure to remain. That legal line mattered to the family because the public facts were so stark. Relatives said Rodriguez was on her way to work that day. Police said she was struck, carried for at least part of the route on the hood of the car and then left in the street. Her son-in-law, Rogelio Romero, told local reporters after the arrest that he was angry and believed people have done less and been charged more severely. The family also said that for weeks their grief was mixed with confusion because detectives believed Rodriguez had likely been hit a couple of blocks away from where her body was found, but the exact collision point was never publicly pinned down.
At sentencing on March 14, Pima County Superior Court Judge Danielle Constant imposed a prison term of 2 1/2 years, with credit for 100 days already served. By then, Ibarra-Guerrero had pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death or serious injury. The hearing put the victim’s family and the defendant in the same room for the first time since the plea. Romero told the court that her mother had spent years working as a caregiver for people who could not help themselves. Another relative urged the judge to make clear that “the choices people make have real consequences.” The defense, according to local coverage, acknowledged that Ibarra-Guerrero made a series of mistakes but argued the underlying collision was an accident. The judge weighed those competing views against the available evidence and the single charge before the court. Because there was no homicide conviction, the sentencing range was built around the hit-and-run offense rather than around a count alleging he intentionally or recklessly caused Rodriguez’s death.
The case drew sustained attention in Tucson not only because of the victim’s age, but because the picture that emerged from public documents was so hard for relatives to accept. Rodriguez was 75. Her family said she was a mother of six and a grandmother whose life touched far more people than just her immediate household. Mary Rodriguez Romero said her mother was “my world,” then widened the portrait to include the neighborhood and the people she had cared for over the years. “More than just for us as a family,” Romero said in one interview, “everybody was her family.” That public grief stood beside a colder set of facts: a road, a damaged car, DNA on the hood, and a man who prosecutors said got out, looked at the victim and left. Those details gave the case its emotional force even without a murder allegation. They also explain why the sentencing, though brief in procedural terms, landed as a major public moment for the family. They were not only mourning Rodriguez. They were also confronting the legal limits of what the state said it could prove.
There are still unanswered questions in the public record. Police have not publicly identified the precise point of impact. The available reports say Rodriguez’s body was found on West Tennessee Street and that personal belongings were located near Liberty Avenue and Kentucky Street, but investigators did not publicly reconstruct every second between those points. It also remains unclear from the public record whether Rodriguez fell from the hood or was pushed off before she was left in the roadway. Those unknowns help explain why the evidence appears to have supported a strong fleeing-the-scene case but not a homicide prosecution based on the collision itself. In practical terms, though, the criminal case is now largely complete. A guilty plea has been entered, a prison sentence has been imposed and jail credit has been applied. Any further court action would most likely come through an appeal or a post-sentencing filing rather than a new trial.
As the case stands now, Ibarra-Guerrero has been sentenced and Rodriguez’s family has used the courtroom to make clear that the punishment did not erase their loss. Barring any later appeal, the March 14 hearing marked the last major public court milestone in the case arising from Rodriguez’s death.