Arizona man convicted in gunpoint robbery of dancer later murdered

Cudjoe Young was convicted Wednesday of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery in a case that now sits at the center of a far more serious question: how a man accused of targeting a Phoenix dancer at gunpoint in 2020 later became charged in her killing.

Maricopa County jurors found Young guilty on May 27, 2026, after prosecutors said he and another man followed Mercedes Vega and another dancer home from the same Phoenix gentlemen’s club, then pointed a gun and demanded their belongings. Vega was 19 at the time and identified Young as the masked assailant in a police report, giving law enforcement an early link between the robbery and the young woman who would later be killed.

Three years later, on April 16, 2023, Vega was abducted from the parking garage of her apartment building. Authorities said she was found beaten, shot and burned in the back seat of a Chevrolet Malibu on Interstate 10 west of Phoenix, with bleach poured down her throat. Prosecutors said the killing was designed to stop Vega from cooperating with law enforcement and from testifying in court, turning a robbery case into a broader examination of what might have happened if the earlier threats had been met with stronger intervention.

Young is separately charged in Vega’s death along with Sencere Hayes and Jared Gray. Maricopa County prosecutors said in December 2025 they planned to seek the death penalty against Young and Hayes if they are convicted of murder, kidnapping and arson, citing the especially heinous, cruel or depraved nature of the killing. Hayes was arrested in Tennessee in November 2024. Gray was in custody in Georgia on unrelated charges and had not been extradited to Arizona at the time of the reporting.

The murder case has moved slowly for years, and the delay has kept attention fixed on the chain of events that began with the robbery. Earlier reporting said Vega was supposed to testify about the 2020 attack on the day she was found dead, a detail that has intensified scrutiny of whether the justice system missed a chance to protect her after the initial gunpoint robbery.

Young will be sentenced later in the robbery case. The murder trial is expected in 2027, where prosecutors will again test the same chronology: a robbery, a witness, a killing, and the unanswered question of whether earlier prosecution or supervision failures left Vega exposed.