Defendants sentenced in beating

Bill Gang

Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1998 | 10:48 a.m.

Although former Henderson veterinarian Alan Ruegamer defiantly maintained his innocence in a near fatal beating of a fellow veterinarian, he has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

His co-defendant, Jacqueline Demaria, sobbed through much of Monday's sentencing hearing and said she was sorry for what happened to Dr. James Reilly. But she neither admitted nor denied a role in the 1994 incident at an abandoned house northwest of Las Vegas.

Similar to Ruegamer, she was convicted by a jury on June 19 of attempted murder, but her lesser role resulted in only a four-year sentence from District Judge Michael Douglas.

Reilly, whose halting speech and deliberate movements are evidence of the baseball bat beating he endured, said Monday that while he still has memory problems, he clearly remembers being victimized by Ruegamer and Demaria.

Deputy District Attorney Steve Owens equated the force of the beating to what would have occurred if Reilly had fallen from a two story building onto his head.

"I heard him say he wanted and expected me to die," Reilly recalled Ruegamer saying. The victim asked Douglas to sentence his onetime partner to the maximum sentence of 20 years.

"He has no principles, no conscience, no remorse," Reilly continued. "He will continue to cheat and hurt people."

Reilly said that Demaria, an auto repossession driver and single mother of three, should get a lesser sentence because he recalled that she said she didn't want him to die.

The case, Douglas said, boiled down to whether the jury believed and trusted Reilly's memory about the attack he suffered after being lured to a home on the pretense of sedating a cat for travel.

Defense attorneys argued that there was no independent evidence supporting the recollections.

Ruegamer had been Reilly's former partner but the relationship dissolved into an angry feud.

Ruegamer tried to have criminal charges filed against Reilly over $13,000 in disputed office equipment. Reilly, by then, had become a key witness against Ruegamer in a probe by the Board of Veterinary Examiners over allegations of practicing medicine without a license.

Although Reilly had been left for dead after the beating, he regained consciousness and began driving for help when he was found by investigators with the Board for Veterinary Medical Examiners, who had gotten a call from his wife that he hadn't returned from a house call.