An Arizona woman mistakenly stopped with a Grappler device during a pursuit tells the ABC15 Investigators she thought she and her daughter were going to die.
“The exact moment when it happened is devastating,” said Tristan Sosa, “just seeing my daughter’s face was… I don’t think I could ever forget that.”
Sosa was driving in the town of Guadalupe in October 2023 when she recounted looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a cop really close behind her. “I thought he hit my car. I didn’t think he threw something at my car,” she said.
We previously reported that a Tempe police officer chasing a suspect deployed a Grappler to try and stop the vehicle, but records show it was the wrong car.
See the original investigation in the player below.
Tempe police mistakenly grappled wrong car during pursuit, records show
A Grappler is a device used by police in an attempt to stop a moving vehicle. It deploys from the front of a police car and attaches to the suspect vehicle’s back tire.
The pursuit was in October 2023, but it took nearly a year for the Tempe Police Department to release the body camera video through a public records request.