In a remarkable and emotional moment inside an Arizona courtroom, a victim of a fatal road rage shooting “returned” to deliver a message to his killer — through artificial intelligence.
Chris Pelkey, a 37-year-old Army combat veteran, was killed in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021 during a road rage encounter.
This week, three and a half years later, Pelkey appeared in video form at his killer’s sentencing hearing, thanks to AI technology.
“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” Pelkey’s AI-generated likeness said in the video. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.”
The video, featuring Pelkey’s voice and image reconstructed from old footage, was created by his family, who worked with AI tools to simulate what he might have said.
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His sister, Stacey Wales, said the idea stemmed from a haunting question: What would Chris say if he were still here?
They fed dozens of videos and audio recordings into the AI system, producing a message they believed reflected Chris’s deep faith and forgiving nature.
The project may be the first known instance of an AI-generated victim impact statement used in a U.S. courtroom.
Judge Todd Lang praised the video, saying, “I loved that AI. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness. I feel that that was genuine.”
Horcasitas was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison on manslaughter charges.
Chris’s brother John Pelkey said seeing his brother’s AI recreation brought “waves of healing,” and believes Chris truly would have forgiven the man who took his life.
The use of AI in the courtroom is raising new legal questions, and the U.S. Judicial Conference is now considering how to regulate AI-generated evidence.
For the Pelkey family, though, the technology offered something beyond debate: a moment of peace and a voice from beyond that still had something powerful to say.
