Tempe Police Grappled a 140-MPH Corvette and Booked Its Driver on a Felony — A Year Later, No Case Shows Up in Superior Court

A white C8 Corvette crossed the Mill Avenue Bridge over Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona, on the night of Sept. 9, 2025, fast enough that the car’s own camera recorded it in triple digits. Tempe police said the video showed the car “hitting 140 mph and blowing through red lights”; Arizona’s Family, which aired the footage, put the reading at 142. A motorcycle officer tried to pull the Corvette over that night. Police say the driver ran red lights and got away.

He got one more night. On Sept. 10, officers spotted the same Corvette and, according to the department, the driver “even tried to run from police” again. This time a patrol car fired a Grappler, a nylon net launched from the push bumper that wraps a fleeing car’s rear tire and drags it to a stop. Tempe police impounded the car and, in the department’s words, “booked the driver on a felony.” Police identified him as Mazen Alassmari, and Arizona’s Family reported the booking charge as felony flight.

Tempe turned the arrest into a public message. Its October 2025 post of the video closed with “We hear you. We act.” and a promise of “zero tolerance for reckless driving” under the city’s Vision Zero traffic-safety program. A year later, the half of that message aimed at the car is the half the public record can confirm. The half aimed at the driver is much harder to find.

View this post from the Tempe Police Department on Instagram

Video: Tempe Police Department, via Instagram

What Maricopa County’s felony docket shows

Felony cases in Maricopa County are prosecuted in Superior Court. On Sept. 30, 2026, I searched the court’s public criminal case index for the name Tempe police released, first by full name and then by last name alone. Both searches came back “Sorry, no matches to your query.” The same search for a common name returned pages of cases, so the index was working.

That does not mean the driver walked, and it does not mean he did what police accused him of. A booking is an arrest, not a charge. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office decides whether a felony gets filed, and a case can sit in review for months. It could also be indexed under a different spelling, or have been handled as misdemeanors in Tempe Municipal Court, whose records sit behind a state lookup Backfire News could not search. I found no public statement from Tempe police on the case after the October 2025 post.

The calendar still matters. Under Arizona’s statute of limitations, prosecutors have seven years to bring a class 2 through class 6 felony and one year to bring a misdemeanor, counted from when the state discovers the offense. A felony flight charge for September 2025 can be filed until September 2032. Any misdemeanor charge for the same two nights of driving had to be filed by this month.

The charges Tempe’s video points to

Felony flight is ARS 28-622.01: a driver who willfully flees or tries to elude a marked police vehicle running its emergency signals commits a class 5 felony. For a first offense, the sentencing table in ARS 13-702 runs from six months at the mitigated end to 2.5 years aggravated, with a presumptive term of 1.5 years. A class 5 felony also carries a probation term of up to three years under ARS 13-902.

The speed is its own crime. Arizona’s excessive speed law makes it a class 3 misdemeanor to drive more than 20 mph over the posted limit, which 140 mph clears on any road in Tempe, freeways included. Reckless driving under ARS 28-693 is a class 2 misdemeanor with a possible license suspension of up to 90 days.

Arizona’s racing statute doesn’t need a second car. ARS 28-708 bans any “exhibition of speed or acceleration” on a street, along with driving “for the purpose of making a speed record.” The wording reaches a single car on an empty bridge. A first conviction is a class 1 misdemeanor with a fine of at least $250 and a possible 90-day suspension. A second within 24 months becomes a class 6 felony with at least 10 days in jail or prison before any release.

The 20-day impound that needs no conviction

The Corvette went to impound the night of the stop, and Arizona built that step so it doesn’t wait for a verdict. ARS 28-3511 requires an officer to remove and impound a car when the driver is reckless driving or racing and the officer reasonably believes letting him keep driving would expose others to “the risk of serious bodily injury or death.” The hold lasts 20 days, and the statute says an insurer has no duty to pay “any benefits for charges or fees for immobilization or impoundment.”

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A post shared by Tempe Police Department, AZ (@tempepolice)

Tempe adds a $150 administrative fee for every car held under the 20-day law, separate from the tow company’s towing and storage charges, according to the police department’s vehicle impound page. Owners are entitled to a poststorage hearing, which the department schedules by appointment on weekdays. The city doesn’t publish the tow yard’s storage rates, so the full bill depends on who hooked the car.

Tempe police have been plain about the strategy. During a two-week street-racing operation in late June 2025, Sgt. Matthew Barker told Arizona’s Family, “If you come over to Tempe, and you race or put the lives of the people that are in Tempe in danger because you want to race, we will add your car to our collection.” That operation, Operation Street Shield, produced 310 vehicle stops, 82 arrests and 43 impounded vehicles, the station reported. Tempe isn’t the only place where the car goes with the driver: in North Carolina, a Mustang driver accused of a triple-digit chase in Currituck County landed in jail and lost the car.

Tempe’s street-racing summer and the Grappler

The Corvette run came eight days after a street race on Rio Salado Parkway, east of Rural Road and a few minutes from the bridge, ended with a Ford Mustang hitting a photo-enforcement sign. All five people in the Mustang were ejected; police later said none of the injuries were life-threatening, Arizona’s Family reported.

The Grappler is a local product, built in a Peoria, Arizona, workshop. In 2023 it cost about $5,000 per unit and nearly 1,000 were installed on police vehicles nationwide, with the Arizona Department of Public Safety as the largest customer, Fox 10 Phoenix reported. Its purpose is to end a pursuit early and slowly, before it turns into something like the 140-mph Arkansas chase that ended in a rollover. In the Corvette stop, it worked as designed, and nobody was hurt.

When Tempe’s Grappler caught the wrong car

The same tool has cost Tempe before. In October 2023, Tempe officers helping the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office chase an aggravated-assault suspect in Guadalupe grappled a white Buick Verano they believed matched the suspect’s car. It was the wrong car. A woman and her daughter were inside, and body camera video shows officers ordering them out with weapons drawn, ABC15 reported after getting the footage through a public records request. Neither was hurt. No officers were disciplined, and the department told the station officers were trained on identifying suspect vehicles.

The net punctured the Buick’s gas tank and the car was declared a total loss, with damages near $10,000, ABC15 reported in a follow-up. Tempe paid a little over $500, and that money went to a rental company. The owner never filed a notice of claim, which under Arizona law ended her case before it began. ARS 12-821.01 gives anyone with a claim against a city 180 days from the damage to file one, and the claim must name “a specific amount for which the claim can be settled and the facts supporting that amount.” A claim filed late “is barred and no action may be maintained thereon.” If the city doesn’t answer within 60 days, the law treats the claim as denied.

What comes next for the Corvette case

For the driver police named, the next date belongs to prosecutors: felony flight stays fileable until September 2032, and if a case is filed, the Superior Court index is where it will appear. For everyone else on Tempe’s roads, the two Grappler cases set out the rules. A car held under the 20-day law comes with a right to a poststorage hearing and a $150 city fee that no insurer has to cover. A car damaged by police action comes with a 180-day window to file a claim with a dollar figure attached, and the city can deny it by saying nothing for 60 days.

Tempe took the Corvette off the road in one night, and a year later no felony case under the driver’s name appears in Superior Court. Should cities keep leaning on the Grappler and the 20-day impound to deal with triple-digit drivers, or does taking the car let the system skip the slower work of winning a conviction?

About the Author

Shawn Henry

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Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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