Shawna Forde: Arivaca Home Invasion, Death Sentence, and Appeals

Shawna Forde is a former anti-immigration vigilante leader who was sentenced to death in Arizona for orchestrating the May 2009 home invasion in Arivaca that killed Raul “Junior” Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores. Forde founded a small splinter group called Minutemen American Defense and planned the attack to rob suspected drug traffickers and bankroll a border militia compound. She remains on Arizona’s death row, and her federal habeas corpus case is active and currently stayed while her attorneys return to state court on additional claims.¹

Who Shawna Forde Was Before the Murders

Forde lived in Everett, Washington, and entered the anti-immigration activist scene in early 2006 through Minutemen border-watch events in her state. She gave herself leadership titles inside the Washington Minuteman Detachment, including “media director” and “events director,” and in 2007 ran for an Everett City Council seat on an anti-immigration platform, receiving 5,892 votes.²

Her time with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps was short. MCDC co-founder Chris Simcox later said his organization expelled her in 2007 for “lying and pretending to be a senior leader.”³ She then founded Minutemen American Defense, a splinter group of roughly fifteen to twenty members.⁴ By 2008, Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist had named her his “border patrol coordinator.”²

Associates described Forde as a relentless self-promoter who fabricated stories to build credibility. In the months before the killings she reported a string of violent incidents — a claimed attack at a Seattle Starbucks in 2006, a car accident she blamed on being run off the road, and a reported shooting and assault in late 2008 and early 2009 — that investigators and associates believed she staged.⁴

The Arivaca Home Invasion

Forde’s plan was to rob suspected drug traffickers along the Arizona border and use the proceeds to build a militia training compound. She recruited Jason Bush, a white nationalist with a history of violent crime whom she called her “number two,” and Albert Gaxiola, an Arivaca drug dealer who viewed Raul Flores as a rival.⁵ Another local dealer, Oin Oakstar, introduced Gaxiola to Forde and Bush in mid-May 2009 and showed them locations near the Flores home on May 29, but declined to join the invasion itself.⁶

At about 1:00 a.m. on May 30, 2009, the three arrived at the Flores home. Forde and Bush wore camouflage, and Bush had blackened his face. They knocked posing as law enforcement, telling the family they were searching for fugitives. When Raul Flores became suspicious and the door opened, Bush shot him five times, killing him. The attackers then shot his wife, Gina Gonzalez, in the chest and leg. Bush reloaded and shot nine-year-old Brisenia in the head.⁷

Gonzalez played dead. After the attackers briefly left, she crawled to the kitchen, retrieved her husband’s handgun, and called 911. When Bush returned to ransack the house, she opened fire, striking him in the leg and forcing his retreat.⁸ That gunshot wound later helped investigators identify the attackers.⁹

An FBI Informant Warned About the Plan

Weeks before the attack, an FBI informant named Robert Copley warned his handler, Agent Chris Anderson, about Forde’s plan. Copley, a bail bondsman and fugitive recovery agent, had been introduced to Forde through Arizona Minutemen member Ronald Wedow. In April 2009, Forde told Copley the group intended to invade a home in Arivaca to steal drugs, weapons, and cash.¹⁰

On May 15, 2009, Copley attended a recruitment meeting Forde held at a Flying J truck stop in Aurora, Colorado, where she described the planned operation in detail. Anderson had told him to attend, gather intelligence, and report back. Afterward, Copley told Anderson that Forde planned to “hit the house like a SWAT team,” described the threat as “real and imminent,” and handed over a hand-drawn map showing the approximate location of the target home.¹⁰ The map was later lost by the Phoenix FBI office.¹¹ The FBI did not share the information with local law enforcement in Pima County. The invasion took place fifteen days later.

Trial, Conviction, and Death Sentence

Forde was arrested on June 12, 2009. Investigators found a belt buckle marked “G” and jewelry taken from the Flores home in her purse, and a partial DNA profile from a stolen silver ring matched hers. Text messages from her phone referred to the “competition” being “gone” and included the line “I’m in deep now.”⁵

Her trial began in January 2011 in Pima County Superior Court. Prosecutor Rick Unklesbay led the state’s case; Eric Larsen represented the defense. Prosecutors acknowledged Forde did not personally pull the trigger but argued she was “the one in charge.” The defense maintained she had not entered the home.¹² Key evidence included the stolen jewelry, the DNA match, Gonzalez’s in-court identification, testimony from FBI informants about the Colorado planning meeting, the text messages, and testimony from Oakstar, who had pleaded guilty to a weapons charge in exchange for testifying against all three defendants.⁶ Gonzalez’s identification was not clean: she had initially failed to pick Forde from a police lineup and described the female suspect as a “shorter fat woman.”⁸

On February 14, 2011, the jury convicted Forde on all eight counts: two counts of first-degree felony murder, first-degree burglary, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated assault, armed robbery, and aggravated robbery.⁵ In the penalty phase, the jury found multiple aggravating circumstances for each murder and unanimously sentenced her to death, concluding that mitigating factors, including evidence of an abusive childhood and alleged mental incapacities, were “not sufficiently substantial to call for leniency.” She also received sixty-five years’ imprisonment on the non-capital counts.¹³

What Happened to Her Co-Defendants

Jason Bush, the shooter, was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. The jury found three aggravating circumstances: a prior conviction of a serious offense, the commission of multiple homicides on the same occasion, and the murder of a child under fifteen. He received an additional seventy-eight years on the non-capital charges, and the Arizona Supreme Court reviewed his automatic appeal in 2018.¹⁴

Albert Gaxiola, the local drug dealer who helped plan the invasion, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.¹⁵

Appeals and Current Status on Death Row

On January 17, 2014, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Forde’s convictions and death sentences in an opinion by Justice Ann Scott Timmer.¹⁶ The court rejected every claim, including arguments about pretrial publicity, the eyewitness identification, the DNA evidence, and the FBI’s loss of the Copley map. On the map, the court found the FBI’s conduct was negligent rather than in bad faith and that the evidence was “potentially useful” rather than clearly exculpatory. The court did order Forde’s robbery sentences to run concurrently rather than consecutively.⁵

State post-conviction relief was denied by the Pima County Superior Court on April 27, 2018, and the Arizona Supreme Court summarily denied review on October 7, 2020. Forde filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on March 9, 2021, and by January 2024 had filed a second amended petition raising thirty-five claims.¹⁷ On December 1, 2025, Judge Scott H. Rash granted a stay of the federal proceedings so Forde’s attorneys could return to state court and exhaust several claims, including ineffective-assistance-of-post-conviction-counsel arguments strengthened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Shinn v. Ramirez.¹

Forde is one of three women on Arizona’s death row, held by the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.¹⁸ Arizona resumed executions in 2022 after a nearly eight-year hiatus and carried out two executions in 2025. As of mid-2025, twenty-three inmates had exhausted their appeals and were eligible for execution warrants. Forde is not among them because her federal habeas case remains active, and no execution date has been set.¹⁹

Gina Gonzalez’s Lawsuit Against the FBI

In 2012, Gina Gonzalez sued the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging that Agent Anderson received specific, credible intelligence about the planned invasion from Copley and failed to notify the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and that this failure allowed the murders to occur. She argued that FBI guidelines required agents to “promptly transmit” information about serious criminal activity outside their jurisdiction.¹⁵

U.S. District Judge Jennifer Zipps dismissed the case in 2015, ruling that the agent’s decision fell under the FTCA’s discretionary function exception. The Ninth Circuit affirmed 2-1 on February 24, 2016, in Gonzalez v. United States. Writing for the majority, Judge Jay Bybee held that the FBI guidelines did not mandate disclosure because they required agents to weigh factors like informant safety and the impact on ongoing investigations, making the choice to share intelligence a matter of judgment protected from tort liability.¹⁰ Judge Marsha Berzon dissented, arguing the guidelines were mandatory rather than discretionary and that the majority’s reasoning would render virtually all government policies discretionary.¹⁵

1
CaseMine. Forde v. Thornell
2
Type Investigations. Minutemen’s Demise
3
Southern Poverty Law Center. Appeal Denied for Shawna Forde, Nativist Leader and Murderer
4
The Everett Herald. No Boundaries: Shawna Forde and the Minutemen Movement
5
Findlaw. State v. Forde, No. CR-11-0043-AP
6
Arizona Daily Star. Oin Oakstar Testimony
7
Arizona PBS. Shawna Forde Trial
8
ABC News. Minutemen Vigilante Trial: Deadly Arizona Home Invasion
9
Findlaw. Gonzalez v. United States
10
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Gonzalez v. United States, No. 13-15218
11
Courthouse News Service. Family Says Fatal Raid Was Nearly Averted
12
BBC News. US Anti-Immigration Activist Found Guilty of Murder
13
Arizona Courts. State v. Forde Summary
14
Findlaw. State v. Bush, No. CR-11-0107-AP
15
Courthouse News Service. FBI Cleared in Arizona Minutemen Murders
16
The Everett Herald. Shawna Forde’s Death Sentence Upheld
17
GovInfo. Forde v. Thornell, No. CV-21-00098-TUC-SHR
18
Fox 10 Phoenix. Arizona Women on Death Row: Who Are They
19
Arizona Capitol Times. Who on Death Row Is Next for Execution