Psychologists remain at a loss to explain violent behavior

Thursday, June 3, 1999 | 1:28 a.m.

A Las Vegas psychologist said today that despite decades of incidents where people have suddenly erupted and started shooting people, there are no clear answers as to what motivates this behavior.

Family psychologist Tom Sexton, director of a UNLV program to treat violent youths, said today: "We all would like to find the magic bullet that (causes) someone go into a store and shoot, but it is so complex.

"I think we would all like to find the formula that produces these people."

Sexton and Kirby Burgess of the Clark County Youth Services are operating one of two national programs called the Family Project to find out what makes young people turn violent and to prevent it from happening.

Each individual acts from a complex web of individual, family and community influences, Sexton said.

"There's no single event that sets these people on such a trajectory," he said.

People either feel protected as an individual within a family and a community or their world lacks support and puts them at risk, he said. "It is not a single event, but a series of failures."

To find out what causes the problems, experts are looking at many levels and factors, Sexton said.

"What triggers the final act when someone walks into a store and starts shooting?" The answer to that question "will break the camel's back," Sexton said.

Over time, the violence builds as normal protections erode or are never nurtured by the family or the environment, he said.

"And then it may be a love triangle in the end, but there is a whole string of risk factors leading up to it."

Over the years, convenience stores, markets, gas station minimarts and other 24-hour businesses in every area of the Las Vegas Valley have experienced their share of shootings and other violence.

The latest incident happened today when a 23-year-old with a shotgun walked into an Albertson's grocery store at Valley View Boulevard and Sahara Avenue shortly after 5 a.m.

When Metro Police arrived minutes later, four people were dead and a fifth critically injured.

Here are a few of the more high-profile shootings:

In August 1994, Wilbert Leslie walked into a convenience store at 3589 N. Nellis Blvd. and shot 37-year-old clerk William Prewitt to death. Prewitt was a Nellis Air Force Base master sergeant moonlighting to earn extra money for his family. Leslie, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, has been sentenced to death.

In March 1994 Canadian tourist Roger Champagne was shot to death in a recreational vehicle park. The man charged with the murder, Patrick Henry Randle, 32, was subsequently linked by police to seven robberies of convenience stores and pizza parlors.

In October 1995 Raul Hernandez, 19, was shot and killed by police at the Korner Store and Deli at Decatur Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, which he had just robbed.

In October 1986 David Pellegrini, a 19-year-old Bonanza High School graduate with no prior record, walked into a convenience store at Sahara Avenue and Rainbow Boulevard and shot clerk Barry Hancock to death. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld Pelegrini's death penalty in 1988.

SUN LIBRARIANMarice Seda contributed to this story.