After the mid-year random explosion of violence that hit us in 2011, Las Vegas was again the scene of two gruesome, but again unrelated, incidents at the end of 2012. Then another, which followed the submission of this question, occurred early in the New Year.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on the night of Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, a man multiply shot and fatally wounded a woman, then killed himself, near the front entrance of Excalibur. The female victim was a vendor at the hotel's concierge desk who sold show tickets and restaurant reservations for Vegas.com. Although the registration desk was busy, it being a weekend night during NFR week, fortunately no one else was wounded in the incident.
At the time of this writing, Las Vegas homicide detectives were still investigating the motive of the as-yet-unidentified Illinois man, believed to be in his early 30s, and his relationship to 30-year-old Jessica Kenny, although a co-worker told detectives that the victim had mentioned an ex-boyfriend from Illinois who was back in town, describing him as "crazy" and not someone she wished to continue a relationship with.
The timing of the shooting made it even more horrific, occurring as it did just hours after the bloodbath at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, and eye witnesses reported how the gunfire set off mass panic, with screaming people fleeing for safety in all directions.
Jessica Kenny was transported to University Medical Center, but passed away approximately two hours later, while the shooter died at the scene.
Then, less than a week later, on the night of Dec. 21, a female blackjack dealer slashed a co-worker's face in a high-limit pit at Bellagio. The incident took place shortly before 10 p.m. and apparently involved an argument between Brenda Stokes and another dealer, which escalated into the incident that left the victim, 44-year-old Joyce Rhone, with deep razor-blade gashes to the face. It's still not clear from reports whether either of the two dealers was on duty at the time. Stokes was charged with burglary, battery with a deadly weapon, battery with use of a deadly weapon with substantial bodily harm, and mayhem.
What at first appeared to be an isolated instance of violence then took on a much more macabre twist, however, with news that the 50-year-old Stokes was also to be charged for the murder of 10-year-old Jade Morris, the daughter of her fiance Philip Morris. Earlier on Dec. 21, Stokes had picked up Jade from the home of her mother, Tejuana Reeves, allegedly to take the little girl Christmas shopping. Jade never came home and Stokes was the last known person to see her alive, although for reasons that remain unclear she apparently was not immediately considered a suspect in connection with Jade's disappearance. That all changed following her arrest for the slashing of Rhone, at which point bloody clothing was found at Stokes' home and the little girl's blood identified on the steering wheel and door handle of the suspect's car. Jade's body was subsequently found in an undeveloped residential subdivision in North Las Vegas by someone walking their dog. She had been stabbed 40 times.
While initial reports stated that Stokes had for several years had a close relationship with her step-daughter-to-be, a disturbing report in yesterday's Las Vegas Review-Journal cast a different light on this developing case. According to the story, only after his daughter's murder did Philips begin to hear from friends of Stokes' that she'd spoken of her dislike of Jade. "Me and Brenda had no discrepancies. It was A-OK. You can't get a better relationship than the one me and Brenda had, and that's why I'm baffled," Morris stated. Had he had any inkling of a problem, he would have acted. "If you don't love my baby, you don't love me," he said.
Jade's funeral was held on Wednesday.
The story in the R-J traces a history of violence in which the accused allegedly used a razor blade to almost sever the penis of an ex-boyfriend in Mississippi who was about to marry another woman, back in 2003. Details remain hazy, since official records were apparently destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but locals still vividly remember the case (click the link to read more).
According to the piece in the R-J, in 2001 Stokes was also charged with misdemeanor battery after she hit her supervisor at America West airlines in the head with a hot coffee pot following a job-performance meeting. That case was dismissed after Stokes successfully completed counseling.
Stokes was initially jailed for the Bellagio attack with bail set at $60,000, but it was subsequently raised to $600,000 after she was implicated in Jade Morris' murder. Bail was revoked altogether on Jan. 2, after prosecutor Robert Daskas filed an amended criminal complaint charging the 50-year-old dealer with additional counts, including kidnapping, attempted murder, and murder with a deadly weapon.
Stokes, who apparently has not been cooperating with police, did state that she had been feeling "like she wanted to hurt someone" prior to the murder of Jade and attack on Rhone, and reportedly had not been taking her Xanax prescription. According to the police report, she also told police she would have killed her co-worker if casino security hadn't prevented it. "Hell, yeah, I would have whooped that ass. I would have killed her. I should have killed her," she apparently said to detectives.
While no motive for either attack has been established as yet, those close to the people involved speculate that the slashing of Rhone may have been as the result of a suspected love triangle involving Philip Morris, and that Stokes may have killed his daughter as revenge on her fiance.
So, those are the facts, as currently known, in the two cases to which you refer.
Meanwhile, bail has been set at $120,000 for 20-year-old Manuel Garcia Hill, who fired a gunshot into the casino floor at Circus Circus on New Year's Eve. According to the police report, Hill pulled a .38-caliber revolver a little after 11 p.m. on Dec. 31 and fired once into the floor of the casino during a verbal dispute with a child's father concerning the unwanted touching of his daughter. A preliminary hearing date has been set for Jan. 17 in this case.
Finally, earlier this week, yet another incident took place, when a suspect in a San Antonio, Texas, murder shot and killed himself at the Super 8 Hotel at Ellis Island casino while being chased by police officers. A task force that included Metro police officers and U.S. marshals had been trying to apprehend the man when he fatally shot himself at about 9:25 a.m. last Wednesday morning.
Much as this recent spate of violent and tragic crimes might seem to indicate otherwise, with the exception of the New Year's lunacy at Circus Circus, all of these incidents appear to be self-contained events that coincidentally took place in Las Vegas, often involving personal grievances. Although, according to a Forbes report earlier this year, Las Vegas ranks #9 among the nation's "Most Dangerous Cities," most violent crime here happens well away from the tourist hubs and casinos and is often gang/drug-related, or else involves the kinds of crimes of passion that can occur in any city. The worst days of the recent recession, which hit Las Vegas particularly hard, seemed to spur a spate of tragic murder suicides, often among the older generation, but thankfully such events seem to be far less common now.
As we observed in a related QoD after the Forbes report was published:
"With all the interior and exterior surveillance cameras, in-house security, patrolling bike cops, and the sheer volume of people, we've always felt pretty safe and monitored, even to the point of Big Brotherness, on the Strip. Downtown used to be a different story, and anyone who's been visiting for the past decade or more can attest to the fact that things were pretty rough around Fremont Street (until a couple years ago). The clean-up of downtown was a long time coming and spanned various abortive attempts to find a raison d'être for the area, beyond just being a tawdry tourist trap. The emergence of a viable arts district around Fremont East finally seems to have done the trick, and the advent of lots of new cool bars, cafes, restaurants, galleries, etc., is having a positive effect in attracting a bigger and better crowd to the neighborhood.
That's not to say that you won't still find thieves, rogues, and vagabonds lurking in the shadows at times, and you'd be advised to keep your wits about you, just as you should anywhere these days, but there's more parking than there used to be downtown, and better street lighting, plus an altogether more positive vibe.
To summarize and reassure, we'd say we feel above-average safe for an urban environment, both on the Las Vegas Strip and downtown, and it's unusual to hear of violent happenings in either location, particularly the former.
That's what makes a string of well-publicized incidents, such as those that just occurred, or the similar coincidental spate that took place in the summer of 2011, all the more high-profile, as such events are not the norm.
