Good Guy with a Gun #274: Las Vegas, NV
Police were en route while the SUV was still turning around. Minutes are a very long time. | Original incident: August 1, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
His grandmother, Annette Tilley, told him to grab her shotgun.
He was 27. It was just after 6:30 on a Thursday evening, and what had brought him and half the block outside was a black SUV working its way up and down the street, forward and then in reverse, several minutes into it by then. One neighbor later described the whole thing as “a blasted movie.”
He didn’t know why it was happening. Almost nobody out there did.
The man running a remodeling job around the corner knew. It was one of his workers, 47-year-old Carlos Valladares-Moncada. Carlos had turned up that day in a condition unfit to do the job, so the boss had fired him and called the police.
Somebody on one of those calls — I think it’s the boss, though I’m not sure — told the dispatcher (through a translator): “Somebody arrived drunk and high on drugs and got into the house that I’ve been working on.” He said the man had been trying to run him over. The dispatcher asked whether he could get inside the house where he’d be safe. He stopped answering, and people in the background started shouting for an ambulance.
Carlos had caught the man he was after. He struck him with the rear of the SUV while reversing at speed, and the security video shows him go under the vehicle and then get thrown into a wall.
Carlos kept going after that. He put the SUV through three separate front lawns and the walls and fences between them. Steven Bowman, who lives on the street, took debris in the leg from one of those walls. "He didn't care who he was coming after," Bowman told 8 News Now.
Richard Osayna had been out in the road trying to keep people off the man who’d been run down — “I was telling everybody not to touch him, just let him lay there” — when the SUV turned on him. He went over a wall to get clear. “He jumped the curb and pretty much looked at me and gave a slash-throat sign to me,” he told FOX5.
Then Carlos turned toward the man with the shotgun.
The 27-year-old was hollering at him to stop — “Stop! Stop!” — and the SUV came on into his front yard. He fired at least three rounds through the windshield and the driver’s side window.
“And then,” Grandma Tilley tells us, “he just drops the gun on the ground, hands on his head, and he says ‘He’s gone,’ and I went ‘You killed him?’”
It sounds like an accusation, but then she said to him, “You do realize, by shooting that gun at that boy and you killing him, you saved all of us that were outside, and the whole street.”
Osanya made a similar comment: “My neighbor is a hero, my neighbor saved the day.”
The hero walked up to the first officers on scene and told them he was the shooter. They took him into custody, and he was out by the next morning.
Both men whom Carlos Valladares-Moncada had put in the hospital lived: his former boss, with major injuries though not life-threatening ones, and the neighbor whose leg was laid open by debris off one of the walls he’d knocked down, out again inside eight hours.
On the Friday morning after, a TV crew watched Metro officers walk up to the grandmother’s house. She said they’d come to offer her grandson counseling and prayers. She was still working through it herself, standing on her own property, breathing hard. “The realization is finally starting to hit me,” she said.
Sources
Local news
8 News Now led the pack on this one. They got the security video, walked the block the next morning, and then came back a week later with the 911 audio. Note that there are two videos at the third link: The longer, 2:30 segment, is further down the page, but it’s the one you want to watch.
1 dead, 2 injured after suspected workplace incident turns deadly on Las Vegas valley road (Night-of; later updated with the coroner’s identification)
Video shows driver run over boss in west Las Vegas neighborhood after being fired, shot by neighbor (The video, the shot count, and both neighbor interviews)
911 calls reveal chaos as driver attempts to run over ex-boss in Las Vegas neighborhood: ‘Oh my God’ (The 911 audio, a week later)
FOX5 ran the only interview with the neighbor who got the throat-slash gesture, and the only mention of what Metro came back to the house to do.
LVMPD: Man shot, killed after hitting former boss with SUV (Night-of. It has a typo: “He would strike his former employee with the rear end of the vehicle” should read “employer.”)
VIDEO: Neighbor uses shotgun to stop SUV rampage in Las Vegas (Follow-up, 3:10 video)
KTNV posted the full LVMPD briefing and the surveillance clip,.
Homicide investigators respond to shooting near Decatur/Charleston (Four sentences, night-of)
Las Vegas man who ran over his former boss shot dead by witness (The follow-up, with both videos)
News 3 filed the thinnest version of the night and is the only outlet that demotes the homicide lieutenant to sergeant and misspells him on the way. Las Vegas shooting: Man tries to run over boss after losing job, gets killed (KSNV News 3 Las Vegas)
I’m told that the Review-Journal’s Jeff Burbank transcribed more of the police briefing than anyone else, including the one detail that had the SUV in the shooter’s own yard before the shots. I’m hitting a paywall, though. Man shot dead after striking ex-employer with SUV in Las Vegas (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
National news
No reporting of its own, but Colin Kalmbacher read the Las Vegas coverage carefully and got a fresh line out of Metro by email, which is more than most aggregation does. ‘He didn’t care who he was coming after’: Fired construction worker mows down boss with SUV, tries to kill others before neighbor takes him down with shotgun (Law & Crime)
2A / specialist media
Three specialist pickups, all working from the local coverage.
Wow. Amazing the boss lived after that.