On a late Friday evening nearly two years ago, Little Joe Lageman was walking down the sidewalk in his Maryvale neighborhood, headphones in, wearing a dark hoodie and jeans. The 37-year-old had just gotten into an argument with his fiancée at his mother-in-law’s house and decided to take a walk and get some air.
It’s become a ritual of sorts for Lageman — whose legal name is Little Joe — to walk or jog to the nearby Kingdom of Jehovah’s Witnesses church to say a prayer. Though he’s not religious anymore, he used to go with his late grandmother two to three times a week until he turned 13. So, to clear his mind, that’s where he headed.
Lageman was less than half a block away from the church when Phoenix police officer Diego Santana spotted him. Santana was searching for a suspect who’d fled the scene after rear-ending a parked brown Dodge Ram 1500 with dark blue GMC Silverado just down the same block. Lageman insists that hit-and-run suspect wasn’t him, yet his interaction with Santana ended in his arrest at gunpoint and what Lageman says were a chipped tooth and cracked ribs…