My 2023 Maricopa County Case: What Happened at Jersey Mike's, My Plea, and My Experience With Prosecutor Tylon G. Walters
I'm writing this because criminal records can tell part of someone's story without explaining the circumstances behind them.
I have previously written about a separate Maricopa County prosecution involving my name. This article concerns a completely different case from 2023 and my experience with the prosecution associated with Deputy County Attorney Tylon G. Walters.
I want to be careful about what I'm saying here.
I'm not claiming that I made every decision correctly in 2023. I didn't.
I'm also not going to pretend that I am completely innocent. During that period of my life, I made decisions that I regret.
What I dispute is how the specific incident at Jersey Mike's was characterized, how it escalated into an extremely serious criminal accusation, and the circumstances under which I ultimately accepted a plea rather than taking the case to trial.
What happened at Jersey Mike's
On April 29, 2023, I was at a Jersey Mike's in Phoenix.
I had ordered a sandwich. I ultimately decided that I was going to take the sandwich without paying for it.
I can acknowledge that today without accepting everything the government subsequently alleged about what happened.
When I went into the employee area to retrieve the sandwich, an employee intervened.
There was a physical confrontation involving the sandwich. The employee grabbed it, and we both had hold of it. I eventually let go.
According to the camera, however, the confrontation didn't end there.
The employee physically grabbed and restrained me and would not let me leave. I remember her hands and nails digging into me. I raised my voice and demanded that she release me.
When she continued physically holding me, I pulled out pepper spray and sprayed her.
I maintain that I used the pepper spray because I was being physically restrained and wanted to walk away.
People can disagree with my decisions. What matters to me is that the entire sequence be described rather than reducing everything that happened to a label such as “armed robbery.”
The government's own reports document important parts of the encounter
This isn't based solely on my memory.
The police materials I've retained describe the employee intervening and grabbing the sandwich. One account states that the employee “grabbed the sandwich as well” and that “both of them were tugging on the sandwich.”
The report then states that I let go of the food and used pepper spray.
The police records also repeatedly state that the incident was captured on video surveillance.
That surveillance evidence was extremely important to me because I believed the complete recording would show what actually happened during the encounter.
I wanted the video evidence.
I wanted the opportunity to defend myself.
How this became an armed-robbery case
I was subsequently arrested and faced an extraordinarily serious characterization of the incident.
The case documents identify the contemplated original charge as Robbery, a Class 4 felony. Other investigative materials characterized the matter as armed robbery based on the use of pepper spray.
I disagreed with that characterization.
Whatever criticism someone believes I deserved for attempting to take a sandwich without paying, I did not believe that label fairly represented what occurred inside that restaurant.
And I wanted to take the case to trial.
My attorney was Christopher Corso
I was represented by attorney Christopher Corso.
My family paid a substantial amount of money for my defense.
I repeatedly expressed that I wanted the evidence examined and that I wanted to fight the case.
But at the same time, I was under enormous pressure to accept a plea.
That pressure didn't come from only one direction.
Why I ultimately accepted the plea
My parents and other members of my family desperately wanted me to take the plea.
The situation became emotionally overwhelming.
Family conversations weren't calm discussions about litigation strategy. Members of my family were extremely distressed about what could happen if I rejected the agreement and went to trial.
My parents lived outside Arizona. They told me that they couldn't continue dealing with the situation, that they were getting older, and that the stress had become too much for them.
Other family members were also emotionally overwhelmed.
At the same time, I was already isolated and dealing with the possibility of an extremely serious felony prosecution.
I felt like almost everyone around me was telling me some version of the same thing:
Eventually, under the cumulative emotional and practical pressure surrounding me, I agreed to the plea.
I am not claiming here that a court has subsequently ruled that my plea was legally involuntary.
I'm explaining why I personally decided to accept it.
That distinction matters.
What the plea agreement actually says
The official plea paperwork identifies the case as CR2023-139145-001.
The agreement contemplated the original Robbery, Class 4 felony charge and amended the offense for purposes of the plea to:
Theft From a Person — Class 6 designated felony.
I agreed to plead guilty to that amended offense.
The agreement provided that probation was available and stipulated that I would be placed on probation, subject to court approval.
The prosecutor section of my plea paperwork identifies:
Tylon G. Walters
Deputy County Attorney
Court records from the case also identify Tylon G. Walters on the State side and Christopher Corso as my attorney. At least one particular September 7, 2023 proceeding shows another prosecutor, Shawn Harper, actually appearing for the State.
I'm including that distinction because I want this account to be accurate rather than attributing every action taken by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office personally to Walters.
Why I'm naming Tylon G. Walters
I'm naming Tylon G. Walters because the official records associate him with the prosecution and the plea agreement itself identifies him as the Deputy County Attorney in the prosecutor section.
That's a matter of public record.
I believe prosecutors wield extraordinary power.
A charging decision can affect someone's freedom, employment, housing, finances, relationships and reputation for years.
When a government official exercises that kind of authority, I believe the public has a legitimate interest in hearing from people who experienced the system firsthand.
I strongly disagree with how this case was prosecuted.
I believe the circumstances surrounding the physical confrontation, the surveillance evidence, the escalation of the incident into a serious felony prosecution, and the pressure surrounding the eventual plea all deserve to be part of the public story.
Those are my views based on my experience.
I am not representing that a court or disciplinary authority has formally found that Tylon G. Walters committed prosecutorial misconduct.
Where I make criticisms or express conclusions about misconduct, they are my opinions based on my experience and the records available to me.
I'm not rewriting my own mistakes
I'm not publishing this to pretend I was perfect.
I intended to take a sandwich without paying.
I shouldn't have done that.
There were other decisions I made during that period of my life that I wouldn't make today.
Acknowledging those things doesn't require me to agree with every accusation subsequently made against me.
I can take responsibility for what I actually did while disputing what I believe the government got wrong.
That's what I'm doing here.
Why I'm telling this story now
When someone's criminal history appears online, people usually see labels.
They don't see the hours of conversations with attorneys.
They don't see the evidence someone desperately wanted examined.
They don't see the family pressure.
They don't see what it feels like to be told that going to trial could destroy your future.
They don't see the difference between the government's initial characterization of an incident and the offense ultimately contained in a plea agreement.
And they certainly don't hear the defendant's entire account.
I'm putting mine on the record.
I'm not asking anyone to blindly believe me.
Where appropriate, I'm providing the underlying public records so people can examine them and form their own opinions.
But I also have the right to explain what happened, to identify the public officials involved in prosecuting me, to disagree with how they represented the government to characterize my conduct, and to tell people why I ultimately accepted a plea instead of going to trial.
A court record tells you what happened procedurally.
It doesn't always tell you the entire human story behind it.
This is mine.
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The Context Leading Up to This Incident
There is important context surrounding what was happening in my life before the Jersey Mike's incident.
Throughout 2023, I was experiencing repeated problems involving banking transactions, declined payments, transaction reversals, account access, computer systems and other electronic services.
These weren't things I reconstructed years later from memory.
The problems became frequent enough that I started documenting them as they happened. I retained screenshots, financial records, error messages and recordings from that period.
I became increasingly frustrated and distressed by what I was experiencing.
At the time, I believed some of these disruptions were deliberate interference. I began viewing the financial and technological systems around me as working against me, and that perception increasingly affected the way I reacted to everyday situations.
I want to distinguish two things clearly.
I have documentation showing many of the technical and financial problems I experienced. Establishing exactly who or what caused every one of those problems is a separate question.
I'm not going to claim that a particular government agency caused a particular banking error unless I can substantiate that attribution.
But the effect these repeated experiences were having on me is part of the truth about this period of my life.
My behavior didn't occur in a vacuum.
I became increasingly angry at financial and institutional systems that I believed were interfering with ordinary parts of my life. Eventually, I began reacting to that frustration in ways that were confrontational and self-defeating.
That context doesn't automatically make every decision I made legally justified.
Context and justification are two different things.
But context matters when someone is trying to understand why an event happened rather than simply reading a criminal charge and making assumptions about someone's character.
That is the context in which the Jersey Mike's incident occurred.
