The Headline That Should Read Cleared of All Charges but Doesn't
Who Is Homer “The Rock” Moore?
Before the old headlines, before the court case, before the internet learned how to preserve an accusation better than a correction, Homer “The Rock” Moore was already part of Arizona fight history.
To people who only know mixed martial arts through the polished UFC machine of today, the early Arizona cage-fighting scene can feel almost impossible to imagine. It was louder, rougher, stranger, poorer, and more dangerous than the sport that eventually became mainstream. Before million-dollar production crews and corporate sponsors, there were local fighters, small venues, hand-built cages, word-of-mouth crowds, and men willing to test themselves in a sport still fighting for legitimacy.
In that world, Homer Moore was not a footnote. He was a Legend.
He was the name. The Card Draw.
MMA Fighting later described him as one of Rage in the Cage’s early stars and “a genuine tank of a man.” In another discussion of Chael Sonnen’s career, MMA Fighting’s panel described Moore’s place in the early Arizona scene even more plainly: if you were around Rage in the Cage in those days, you could rarely attend an event without seeing Homer Moore fight. He was, they said, “essentially the local champion,” “the local tough,” “the dude,” and “the draw.”
That is the Homer Moore Arizona fight people remember.
He was the wrestler local fighters grew up hearing about. Former WEC champion and UFC veteran Jamie Varner recalled being in high school when he watched Moore headline a Rage in the Cage event against Joe Riggs, another Arizona fighter who would go on to become a major UFC name. For Varner, seeing that kind of fight, a wrestling match where the wrestlers could punch, helped light the fuse. That was the scene that pulled a generation of Arizona athletes toward mixed martial arts.
Moore’s résumé was real. He fought Evan Tanner in the UFC. He fought in World Extreme Cagefighting. He fought in the International Fight League. He faced Dan Severn, one of the sport’s original icons, and walked away with a draw. He defeated Joe Riggs before Riggs became a UFC title contender. He beat Vince Lucero, fought Allan Goes, fought Chad Griggs, and kept showing up across eras, promotions, and weight classes.
Rage in the Cage once promoted Moore vs. Vince Lucero as the main event Arizona fans had been waiting for, a fight to determine who could claim, inside the cage, to be Arizona’s toughest fighter. That was not empty hype. That was how Homer Moore was understood in his own backyard.
He was not just another name.
He was part of the foundation.
Sherdog lists Homer “The Rock” Moore with a professional MMA record of 26 wins, 9 losses, and 2 draws , 37 recognized professional bouts. Those wins included 8 by knockout or technical knockout, 4 by submission, and 14 by decision. He fought across eras and organizations, including the UFC, WEC, IFL, and Rage in the Cage.
And that is why the record matters. When a fighter like Homer Moore loses a win, he does not lose only a statistic. He loses bargaining power. He loses history. He loses the clean public record of what he earned in front of witnesses.
The same thing happens when a man’s name is attached to a murder accusation, the accusation spreads, and the dismissal disappears.
This series begins with Homer Moore not as a scandal, not as a headline, and not as a rumor, but as what he was first: one of the original hard men of Arizona mixed martial arts, a local champion of the early cage-fighting era, and a fighter whose legacy deserves the full record, not just the parts the internet chose to keep.
He was a UFC veteran, a WEC and IFL competitor, a Rage in the Cage mainstay, a 21-time winner inside Arizona’s defining regional promotion, and a combat-sports champion in one of the strangest crossover experiments of the early MMA era.
Whatever happened to his name later, the man had already earned a legacy.
The Frame-Up of Homer Moore
The internet loves a monster. It will feed on a mugshot for decades. But when the truth finally slips out of a locked courtroom file? Silence. Total silence.
Go search former UFC fighter Homer “Rock” Moore right now. You will find the same frozen-in-time headlines from April 2014. First-Degree Murder. Cold Case. Body Found in Trunk. The digital execution of a man’s name, sitting out there in public forever.
But I just left Maricopa Records Office, I have the actual court documents spread out across my desk. The unredacted grand jury transcripts. The police incident narratives. The signed letters from the Maricopa County Public Defender.
And when you look at the actual paper trail, the truth isn’t just different from the headlines, it is terrifying. Homer Moore didn’t just walk free because of technicality. The state’s case was a fictional script built on hidden lies, failed science, and a total lack of physical evidence.
The Missing Forensics
When Tempe police paraded Homer in front of cameras in 2014 for the 1999 murder of Karam Hussein Jabbar, they made it sound like an open-and-shut investigation.
It wasn’t. It was an empty shell.
Flip to the grand jury transcript pages. Look at the forensic cross-examination. The prosecutor asks about latent fingerprints lifted directly from the rental car where the victim was discovered in a Fry’s Food Store parking lot.
The investigator’s answer? “No, they did not match anybody that was involved or could have been involved in this investigation.”
What about the physical evidence on the victim? Two stray hairs were recovered directly from the victim’s shirt. The grand jury explicitly asked the state’s witness if those hairs belonged to Homer Moore.
The official sworn testimony: “Homer Moore was able to be excluded... basically there was no information that Homer Moore was the donor of those two hairs.”
No prints. No DNA. No physical tie to the crime scene whatsoever.
Built on a Hidden Deception
So how did they lock a man up for two years on a million-dollar bond with zero physical evidence?
They used informants. Specifically, a jailhouse ecosystem of people trying to trade rumors to get out of their own criminal charges. The entire case rested on a 1999 statement from a man named Ronald Lee Hamilton, who claimed Homer bragged about the crime.
But the state hid the rot at the foundation of that story.
According to a Maricopa County Superior Court order under case
-001587-001 DT, the grand jury was intentionally left in the dark. The document reveals a stunning admission: the main witness against Homer was a paid police informant working off his own crimes.
Worse? That informant took a polygraph test regarding Homer’s alleged involvement. The result? The court order notes the test “showed the presence of deception regarding Homer’s involvement in the victim’s death.”
Let that sink in. The state’s star witness failed his lie detector test about Homer. The police knew it. And they still used his words to put a man in a cage.
Two Years of Stolen Life
Homer Moore didn’t break out of prison, and he didn’t sneak away on a technicality. The state dropped the case because their house of cards completely collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty.
I have a letter from the Office of the Public Defender, signed by Jennifer Guenther, Esq., dated January 19, 2016. It details the exact cost of this botched investigation:
“Mr. Moore remained in the custody of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office until he was released on January 6, 2016. The charge against Mr. Moore was dismissed... he has no felony convictions on his record to date.”
Two years. Locked away from his family, his gym, and his career. For a crime the state’s own forensic team explicitly excluded him from.
The Battle for the Record
This is the second time Homer Moore has had his life completely altered by a quiet bureaucratic pencil whipping.
In our previous story about our local celebrity we reported, back in 2003, at Rumble on the Rock in Hawaii, Homer fought future UFC legend Chael Sonnen. The judges awarded the decision to Homer. His hand was raised. He was handed the winner’s purse. Decades later, Sonnen himself went on camera to admit the truth: promoters went into the back room, manually altered the scorecard, and flipped the win to Sonnen to protect his marketable UFC-bound record.
A altered scorecard costs you an athletic career. A buried dismissal costs you your entire life. Both are costing this man his ability to provide for his family.
The prosecutors filed their motion to dismiss. They packed up their briefcases, went home, and left the 2014 smear campaign online to do the rest of the damage. It’s time to stop reading old headlines. Look at the court record. Clear his name.
The next headline, this headline should read, “The charge against Mr. Moore was dismissed... he has no felony convictions on his record to date”.
Media Professionals should do the right thing and clear this mans record, period.
Comments