FILED United States Court of Appeals PUBLISH Tenth Circuit UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS December 18, 2018 Elisabeth A. Shumaker FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT Clerk of Court _________________________________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. No. 17-4131 DEON RAYMOND MARTINEZ, Defendant - Appellant. _________________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Utah (D.C. No. 1:16-CR-00004-DN-1) _________________________________ J. Edward Jones, Heber City, Utah, for Defendant-Appellant. Felice John Viti, Assistant United States Attorney (John W. Huber, United States Attorney, with him on the brief), Salt Lake City, Utah, for Plaintiff-Appellee. _________________________________ Before PHILLIPS, EBEL, and MORITZ, Circuit Judges. _________________________________ MORITZ, Circuit Judge. _________________________________ During a traffic stop in Arizona, law enforcement discovered evidence linking Deon Martinez to a bank robbery in Utah. Martinez argues that the state trooper who pulled him over lacked reasonable suspicion to do so. For the reasons discussed below, we agree. We therefore reverse the district court’s order denying Martinez’s motion to suppress this evidence. Background The relevant facts unfold along a 130-mile stretch of the Interstate 40 (I-40) corridor in Arizona. At 11:41 one morning, a state police dispatcher reported a robbery at a Wells Fargo in Winslow, Arizona. Christian Phillips, an Arizona State Trooper, heard this report while patrolling I-40 about an hour east of Winslow. The dispatcher identified two suspects: (1) a man wearing a Bud Light hat and (2) a man running “from the bank in the alley wearing a blue-and-white checkered shirt[ and] blue jeans.” R. vol. 2, 16. The dispatcher didn’t identify any vehicle the thieves might have used to make their escape. Nor did the dispatcher identify the race, ethnicity, or physical features of either of the two robbery suspects. At 12:13 p.m. that same day, Phillips heard a second report of activity along the I-40 corridor, this time in Flagstaff, Arizona. This second report described an event that took place before the Winslow robbery and was far less serious; no robbery, or any other crime for that matter, occurred in Flagstaff. Instead, the second report alerted officers about a “suspicious” white Cadillac spotted outside a Wells Fargo branch earlier that morning. Id. at 36. The report also described the Cadillac’s driver: a Native American man wearing “a light blue checkered hoodie” and a Bud Light hat. Id. at 17. And it said that the Cadillac headed east from Flagstaff at 11:00 a.m. The only other identifying detail Phillips recalled was that one of these reports 2 (though he couldn’t say which one) relayed that one of the suspects was wearing glasses. Once he heard the second report, Phillips ventured west on I-40 toward Winslow. Fewer than fifteen minutes later, Phillips saw a white Cadillac—a rare sight on that stretch of I-40, he later testified—driving east on the other side of the highway. He turned around to pursue it and asked dispatch to run its license plate. Phillips caught up to the Cadillac and pulled alongside to look into the driver’s window. Although Phillips later explained ...
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