Maricopa County's 2025 heat-related deaths report, released this April, counted 430 people dead from heat in 2025. Of the 111 who died indoors, an air-conditioning unit was present in 94% of cases. Among those cases where AC was present, the unit was not functioning in 72%.
The air conditioner was there. It was in the room, or on the roof, or bolted to the window frame. And the person is dead.
In the language of a county database, a medical examiner's scene report, a housing survey, or a utility account, these people had air conditioning. They had it the way a man with a seized engine has a car. The machine was present. The cooling was gone. The county report groups the reasons into three categories: "nonfunctioning," meaning the unit was broken or could not be turned on despite electricity being present; "functioning but turned off," meaning the unit worked but was off at the time of the scene inspection; and "no electricity," meaning the power itself was gone. The report does not subdivide further. It does not ask why the unit broke, whether anyone called a repair company, what the estimate was, whether a landlord was notified, whether the resident understood the unit had stopped working, or whether anyone else knew.
The database records the presence of a machine. The death certificate records the outcome. Between those two documents is where the dying happens, and the official record has almost nothing to say about it.
What a capacitor costs
I spent five years on cargo ships. When something broke, you fixed it or you lived with it broken, and the ocean didn't care which. But the ocean was honest about being dangerous. Nobody filled out a form saying the ship had a functioning bilge pump when the bilge pump was seized. The form and the pump were understood to be different things.
A residential AC capacitor replacement runs roughly $250 to $400. A condenser fan motor, $200 to $700. A compressor, out of warranty, $1,800 to $2,800. A full central AC replacement starts around $5,000.
The average retired-worker Social Security benefit in Arizona, as of December 2024, was $2,019.52 per month. Median was $1,976.
A capacitor is one-eighth of a month's income. A fan motor could be a third. A compressor is a month and a half. A new unit is two and a half months' checks, assuming you don't eat or pay rent or buy medications.
Brett George Westbrook was 65 when his body was found decomposing in his trailer. Friends had noticed he'd missed his daily walk for four days and requested a welfare check. The Guardian reported that his AC had been broken for six months. He'd been taking cold showers. He told relatives he'd tried to fix it himself and failed. Professional repair, he said, was too expensive.
Six months. Half a year of cold showers in a trailer in Arizona, waiting for the season that would kill him. The database, when someone finally checked, would have recorded: has AC, yes.
Ten contact attempts
Katherine Korman was 82 years old, living in Sun City West, when Arizona Public Service disconnected her electricity for nonpayment in mid-May 2024. The high that day was about 99 degrees. She was found dead six days later.
APS said it made ten attempts to contact Korman before the disconnection. Phone calls, emails, a door hanger, monthly bills. The company said regulators reviewing the case determined APS had followed its rules on customer outreach. APS did not admit wrongdoing. It did agree, as part of a $7 million settlement with the state of Arizona reached in April 2026, not to disconnect customers for nonpayment when forecast highs reach 95 degrees or above.
The Arizona Corporation Commission requires regulated electric utilities to adopt one of two approaches to summer disconnections: a weather-triggered moratorium when forecasts include temperatures above 95 degrees, or a calendar moratorium from June 1 through October 15. Medical-certificate exemptions exist for customers whose health depends on electric service. But Korman died in mid-May, before APS's calendar moratorium kicked in on June 1. The rules drew a line at the calendar, and she was on the wrong side of it by a few weeks.
What ten contact attempts looks like for an 82-year-old living alone: A phone call she might not have heard or understood. An email she might not have checked. A door hanger she might not have seen. Monthly bills that, if she was struggling to pay them, she may have stopped opening. Each attempt generates a record. Each record demonstrates compliance. The compliance file gets thicker while the house gets hotter. The institution perfects its documentation while the person the documentation is supposed to protect slips further from contact. Two systems running side by side, one made of paper and one made of flesh, with no mechanism connecting them.
Salt River Project, the other major utility in the metro area, suspends nonpayment disconnections during July and August and during Extreme Heat Warnings. But bills keep generating. Late fees keep accruing. The moratorium doesn't forgive the debt. It delays the disconnection until the moratorium ends, at which point the accumulated balance is larger than it was before the moratorium started. Protection with a timer built into it.
109 degrees from the vent
Patricia Miletich was 70 years old, living in a 55-and-older RV resort in El Mirage, when she died in June 2024. The Guardian reported from her autopsy record that her power was on when she died. Her AC was not functioning. It was blowing air between 109 and 117 degrees.
A neighbor told death investigators that Miletich had memory issues and had forgotten to pay bills on multiple occasions, leading to prior electricity shutoffs. The resort manager confirmed her power had been disconnected several times before. Her brother Michael told the Guardian the family didn't know about her memory decline or the shutoffs.
Miletich's case sits at the intersection of mechanical failure and physiological vulnerability that runs through the county's indoor death data. Ninety percent of Maricopa's indoor heat deaths in 2025 occurred among people 50 and older. The CDC identifies adults over 65, people with chronic health conditions, people with disabilities, people with mental health conditions, and socially isolated people as groups at higher risk from heat. The CDC's clinician guidance lists drugs that interfere with the body's ability to regulate temperature or recognize that it needs to: diuretics, anticholinergics, beta blockers, antipsychotics, SSRIs, opioids, benzodiazepines. Some reduce the sensation of thirst. Some impair sweating. Some cause sedation or cognitive impairment. Some increase drug toxicity during dehydration. A person taking two or three of these medications, which is not unusual for a 70-year-old with common chronic conditions, may be sitting in a room where the AC has stopped working and not feel the urgency that would prompt a younger, unmedicated person to act. Miletich had memory issues severe enough that she forgot to pay her electric bill multiple times, and her family didn't know. The body's alarm system can be chemically muffled by the same medical regimen that is, in every other respect, keeping the person alive. And the social alarm system, the family member who might notice, can be absent for the simple reason that nobody told them anything was wrong.
The Westbrook and Miletich cases fall into the county's "nonfunctioning" category. Korman's falls into "no electricity." But the report also identifies cases where the AC was "functioning but turned off." The county does not explain why a working unit would be off in lethal heat. Stephen Patterson's case, reported by the Guardian from Lake Havasu City in Mohave County, offers one documented answer. Patterson was 69, living on a $1,000 monthly Social Security check. He rationed his AC use because he believed he could cope with the heat but not without alcohol, and because he incorrectly blamed the AC for a mold problem in his house. The indoor temperature was 102 degrees when he died. The daily high outside was 116. His sister Regina told the Guardian: "It was like a furnace." A functioning unit, turned off by a person making choices shaped by addiction, fixed income, and misinformation. The county report's category can hold the fact. The reasons live somewhere else.
Richard Chamblee's case, also reported by the Guardian from Mohave County, is outside the Maricopa dataset but documents something the county numbers cannot: the speed of collapse when cooling fails. Chamblee was 52, clinically obese, bed-bound. When his central AC began blowing hot air in mid-June, his family couldn't afford immediate repair. They bought a window unit, placed it next to his bed, used fans, ice packs, cold drinks, and check-ins. The indoor temperature hovered near 100 degrees despite everything they tried. His core temperature was 108 when he reached the emergency room. He died two days after the AC failed.
"It just happened so fast."
— Sherry Chamblee, his wife. His son John said: "My dad couldn't move."
Two days. And that was in a household where other people were present, watching, improvising. OSHA lists confusion, slurred speech, and unconsciousness as signs of heat stroke requiring immediate emergency response, and notes that heat conditions can worsen quickly and result in fatalities. Once cognitive impairment sets in, self-rescue is no longer a reliable assumption. For a person living alone, the window between "the AC stopped" and "I can no longer help myself" may close before anyone knows it opened.
Fifty-three welfare checks
Of the 111 indoor heat deaths in Maricopa County in 2025, 53 were discovered through welfare checks. The report doesn't say how long the person had been dead when found.
The county report doesn't say who initiated the check or what prompted it.
Westbrook's friends noticed he'd missed his walk for four days. Korman was found six days after her power was cut.
The welfare check is the last link in the chain, and it reveals the one the county report can document but cannot explain: isolation. The ordinary isolation of an older person whose daily contacts are thin enough that a four-day silence doesn't immediately alarm anyone. The neighbor who waves but doesn't knock. The family member in another state who calls on Sundays. The friend who figures he's just staying in because of the heat.
Twenty-three percent of Maricopa's indoor heat deaths occurred in an RV, trailer, or mobile home, though those structures account for only 5% of the county's housing stock. The report breaks indoor deaths into 62 houses, 23 apartments or condos, 13 mobile homes, and 12 RVs or trailers. It does not record whether the person rented or owned. It does not record whether a landlord had been notified of a broken unit. Arizona law requires landlords to maintain air conditioning in good and safe working order where installed and offered, and classifies failure to supply cooling as a breach entitling tenants to specific remedies. But a legal remedy requires a person capable of asserting it. A person who knows the law, who can write a letter, who can find alternative housing while waiting for compliance, who can front the cost of a repair and deduct it from rent. The statute assumes a tenant who is, in every sense that matters in a 115-degree week, functional.
No published reporting located for this piece documents a 2024 or 2025 Phoenix-area case in which a renter died of heat after a landlord had been notified of AC failure. That doesn't mean it happened, and it doesn't mean it didn't. It means the chain of evidence between the landlord's legal obligation and the medical examiner's scene report passes through territory nobody has mapped in public. The gap in the record runs parallel to the gap in the cooling.
What the form doesn't ask
The named cases above are drawn from 2024 deaths documented in published reporting. The county's 2025 data shows the pattern continuing. Patterson's case comes from Mohave County. The reporting on Westbrook does not name his city. What the available record provides is a set of documented examples, from Arizona's broader heat crisis, of the specific ways people fall through the distance between "has AC" and "stayed alive."
This weekend the temperature will do what it does every Fourth of July in Maricopa County. Most people will move between air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned houses and feel the blast-furnace seconds in between as a novelty, a point of local pride even. The holiday will proceed on the assumption that the infrastructure of ordinary life is functioning, because for most people it is.
The county data says what comes next, statistically if not individually. The indoor deaths cluster in the summer months. The people who die are disproportionately over 50, disproportionately in mobile homes and trailers, disproportionately discovered by welfare checks. Somewhere in the county right now, the conditions documented in this piece are present: an aging unit in marginal housing, a person on a fixed income, medications that dull the body's heat response, a social network too thin to catch a silence before it becomes permanent. The county report will record, when the time comes, whether a unit was present and whether it was functioning. It will categorize the death and add the number to the next annual report.
The Maricopa County report is, by the standards of local public health, a serious document. It counts what most jurisdictions don't bother to count. It includes heat-contributed deaths that other places would file under heart disease or kidney failure or old age. It publishes the AC data that makes the gap visible. The county's medical examiner's office has described itself as a national model for heat-death investigation. Maybe it is. The categories were built to hold a machine's status, though. A person's situation won't fit in them. The form asks whether there is an air conditioner. Nobody's form asks whether there is anyone.
Has AC: yes. The machine was in the room. The person is dead. Between those two facts lies everything that mattered, and almost none of it made it into the file.
- OSHA's heat rule stalls: The federal heat-illness prevention standard remains a proposed rule after public hearings closed in July 2025, while OSHA issued a new enforcement directive in April 2026 covering agriculture, construction, warehousing, and kitchens where workers don't control shift length, breaks, or cooling.
- Mobile home water systems: An Associated Press investigation found that nearly 70% of mobile home parks managing their own water systems violated drinking-water rules over the prior five years, compounding the exposure of the 17 million Americans who often own the structure but not the land, pipes, or park rules beneath it.
- ABC15's undercounting investigation: A review of Maricopa County death records by ABC15 identified at least 50 cases from 2024 that advocates and experts said raised questions about whether heat's role was dismissed too often, even in a county that counts more broadly than most.
- The 2026 dashboard is live: Maricopa County's real-time heat surveillance page is tracking the current season's deaths as they are confirmed, making it possible to watch whether the indoor AC-present pattern documented in 2025 holds through this summer.