Tucson police are looking into whether the shooting death of a local businessman inside a north side fast-food restaurant Thursday morning is connected to a real estate and mortgage scam in which the victim was implicated.
Thomas S. Piazza, 39, was sitting in a booth at the Chick-fil-A restaurant at 4585 N. Oracle Road about 6:45 a.m. when a man walked up to the table, pulled out a handgun and shot Piazza in the head, said Sgt. Fabian Pacheco, a Tucson Police Department spokesman.
The shooter — who is described as being a stocky white man between the ages of 40 and 50, wearing a bike helmet, dark shorts and a dark windbreaker — walked out of the restaurant and rode away on his bicycle, heading westbound on West Auto Mall Drive, Pacheco said.
“There was no provocation, no exchange of words, nothing,” Pacheco said in explaining the incident.
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Police continue to search for the gunman.
Piazza, a 1993 University of Arizona graduate, was married with four children.
Pacheco said the “working theory” is that the shooting is related to a civil fraud suit filed in June 2009 by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard against Piazza and other local individuals companies in the real estate and mortgage industry.
The suit claimed Piazza, a loan officer, participated in a three-pronged scheme that centered around rent-to-own properties and unqualified buyers, which allegedly bilked 130 investors and 270 prospective home buyers out of between $2 million and $10 million between 2005 and 2007, according to Pima County Superior Court records.
Piazza was tied to the scam through his work with Tucson Mortgage. He had been working for Geneva Financial since January 2009, Geneva president Aaron VanTrojen said.
In March Goddard’s office announced several of the defendants named in the suit had settled with the state, but Piazza was not among those named.
A call made by the Star to Piazza’s attorney, Alan Gooding, was not immediately returned.
Piazza was killed while waiting for the start of a weekly breakfast meeting he held at Chick-fil-A as president of the Northwest Tucson chapter of Christian Business Networking.
Piazza, the chapter’s president, helped found the group in April 2009, according to Star archives.
He had arrived early for the 7:15 a.m. meeting, group members said.
“I think it’s probably good no one else was here,” said group member Suzette Howe, who arrived at the restaurant shortly after the shooting. “This is so random.”
Howe, who runs a local media and marketing company called Praise Promotions, said she believes the man who shot Piazza had been at Chick-fil-A on several occasions when the networking group met.
“We had seen him before and we knew he rode a bike,” Howe said. “It wasn’t the first time he was there. We don’t know if he was watching us.”
The suspect may have been seen at the restaurant before at the same time as the networking group, Pacheco said.
It was not the first time Piazza had been shot at by a man on a bicycle, two business associates said.
About three years ago, when Piazza was working at Tucson Mortgage in an office at 1660 E. River Road, someone on a bicycle shot at Piazza as he was going out to his car after work, said Belinda Schweinsberg, who was Piazza’s loan officer at Tucson Mortgage.
Police don’t think the two shootings are connected, Pacheco said. In the earlier case, Piazza confronted a transient at a dumpster, and the transient shot him in the leg before riding his bicycle away.
Contact reporter Brian J. Pedersen at bjp@azstarnet.com or call 573-4224. Contact reporter Tim Steller at tsteller@azstarnet.com or call 807-8427.
