On Feb. 21, 2006, police arrested a suspected murderer after a seven-hour siege on the 20th floor of Harrah's Las Vegas, during which he apparently shot at both police officers and paramedics. According to a Metro spokesman, both emergency services had been called to the hotel at around midnight and found a man on his knees, bleeding from the chest, outside one of the guest rooms. He was taken to hospital, but later died of multiple gunshot wounds.
SWAT teams and hostage negotiators rushed to the scene and began the process of trying to talk the gunman out of the room. Guests were evacuated from the top three floors of the hotel and were apparently given blankets and free buffet meals, in addition to having their rooms comped, but the casino remained open throughout. The siege finally ended at about 7 am when SWAT officers created a diversion by detonating explosives outside the hotel-room window, allowing other officers to fire pepper-gas spray into the room and storm in to arrest the suspect. According to an Associated Press report, police found $7,102 in the room safe, a 40-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun in the bathroom, and a bloody knife on the bedroom floor.
At the time, the relationship between the victim, a Reno resident named Philip Anthony McElreath, 43, and 22-year-old Curtis Billy Bonilla, his suspected killer, was unknown, but it later emerged that the two were acquainted. "We don’t know what the motive was, but it's clear they knew each other," commented Lt. Lewis Roberts, commander of the police homicide unit, the next day. Following his arrest, Bonilla was hospitalized on account of stab wounds that he'd reportedly received in a fight with McElreath in the room, prior to the shooting, but the injuries were not life-threatening and a few days later he was released from the hospital and returned to custody.
On Feb. 27, new charges were filed against Bonilla, including an additional charge of attempted murder based on allegations that he tried to kill a fourth SWAT officer during the standoff. He's now facing a total of seven felony charges, including murder, four counts of attempted murder, discharge of a firearm in a structure, and resisting arrest. April 24 has been set as the date for the preliminary hearing and Las Vegas Justice of the Peace William Jansen ordered Bonilla to remain in custody without bail pending a March 6 bail hearing. The suspect's attorneys said that Bonilla will plead not guilty.
As is often the case when something untoward happens in Las Vegas (or in any other major tourist destination), the incident was given minimal publicity and it took some scouting to find out what we did. All in all it appears that the prior connection between the two principals is what precipitated the problem in this instance and that it just happened to be a Las Vegas hotel room where the showdown took place, so no cause for general alarm. Still, it's worth using such tales to remind yourself that a city with so many people and so much money around will attract nefarious characters. The March LVA contains a story about a con artist who swindled a couple out of several hundred dollars, and past issues of LVA have warned of pickpockets in crowded areas, such as the crowd at the TI pirate show. You come to Las Vegas to have fun, but it's always important to remain vigilant.
