Albuquerque man arrested in deadly Central Avenue hit-and-run case

Isaiah Perez was arrested Tuesday in the long-running hit-and-run case that killed Christopher Cordova at Yale Boulevard and Central Avenue, a delay that shows how long fatal pedestrian crashes can take to unravel when suspects leave the scene and evidence is scattered.

Police say Perez drove a red Mercedes-Benz through a red light on April 19, 2024, struck Cordova while he was using the crosswalk, and fled. Cordova died at the intersection, one of Albuquerque’s busiest and most dangerous traffic corridors, where speeding and signal violations have repeatedly put pedestrians at risk.

The case went cold for months until early 2026, when officers responding to a domestic dispute say Perez admitted he had hit someone with his car years earlier. Investigators then used Perez’s 2024 phone data to tie him to the crash location, and they say he later got rid of the vehicle in Grants, New Mexico. That combination of an admission, digital records and a missing car helped revive a case that had been dormant for nearly two years.

Special agents with the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office arrested Perez and booked him into the Metropolitan Detention Center. He is facing charges including homicide by vehicle, leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death or great bodily harm, tampering with evidence and failure to obey a traffic control signal.

The arrest lands against the backdrop of a citywide push to slow drivers and protect people on foot along Central Avenue. In February 2024, Mayor Tim Keller, APD Chief Harold Medina and Municipal Development Director Pat Montoya said Albuquerque was taking more aggressive steps after police investigated 57 pedestrian crashes in the prior year that resulted in either a fatality or great bodily injury. City officials said there had been six pedestrian fatal crashes between Louisiana Boulevard and Eubank Boulevard along Central, and APD said there had been 14 pedestrian crashes involving fatality or great bodily harm since the beginning of 2024.

APD said its enforcement operations on Central had already produced 65 citations, part of the city’s Vision Zero effort to reduce preventable deaths. For families like Cordova’s, the arrest underscores a harder reality: even when a driver runs, investigators can still work backward through phone records, witness accounts and vehicle evidence to build a case for accountability at one of the city’s most dangerous intersections.