Republican National Convention will feature 3 Arizona speakers
Aug 23, 2020, 12:00 PM | Updated: 5:17 pm
PHOENIX – The Republican National Convention will kick off Monday for four days of speeches in Charlotte, and at least three of the speakers have ties to Arizona.
President Donald Trump’s campaign announced the tentative lineup of speakers Sunday.
Mary Ann Mendoza is scheduled to speak Tuesday night and Carl and Marsha Mueller are expected to speak Thursday night.
Carl and Marsha Mueller’s daughter, Kayla Mueller, was on a humanitarian mission in Turkey in 2013 when she was kidnapped by ISIS after crossing the Syrian border to visit a hospital. She was held captive, tortured and later killed in 2015 by the terrorists.
In Oct. 2019, a U.S. mission led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who was holding Mueller hostage.
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Mendoza’s son, Brandon Mendoza, was a Mesa police officer who was killed in a head-on collision in 2014 by a wrong-way driver who was impaired at the time of the crash. Both the driver, Raul Silva-Corona, and Mendoza died in the crash.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said at the time that Silva-Corona was in the country illegally.
Other speakers include First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump is expected to speak on each night of the convention.
At last week’s Democratic National Convention, where Joe Biden accepted the nomination, four people with Arizona ties spoke at the convention. The speakers included Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez.
Jeff Jeans, a Sedona man and former conservative Republican who supports the Affordable Care Act because he said it saved his life, and Kristin Urquiza, whose father’s coronavirus death made national news, also spoke.
