Police focus on third shootout suspect

Keith Paul

Tuesday, June 13, 2000 | 11:06 a.m.

Henderson Police continued to focus this morning on two casino robbery suspects, hoping their investigation will shake out a third participant in a March shootout that killed two armored car guards.

On Monday Henderson detectives searched the houses of Oscar Cisneros and Jose Vigoa, two men charged Wednesday in a string of Las Vegas armored car and casino robberies. The detectives were looking for evidence linking the two suspects to the March 3 armored car heist. That robbery escalated into a shootout, leaving Armored Transport of Nevada guards Richard F. Sosa and Gary Dean Prestidge II dead outside a Henderson shopping center.

"Most of the activity is on the two suspects, and hopefully those efforts will lead to a third suspect," Capt. Richard Perkins said.

Cisneros, 23, and Vigoa, 40, have not been charged in the slayings, but police seized several guns during searches last week of the suspects' homes and will compare shell casings from those guns to the 7.62 caliber casings from the Henderson slayings and a June 1999 botched armored car robbery outside the Desert Inn.

Perkins told the Sun Monday Cisneros has a gunshot wound in the leg and detectives are trying to determine if it occurred when Prestidge fired off several rounds before being shot down during the robbery outside the Ross Dress for Less store on Stephanie Street.

Police will get a search warrant this week to draw blood from Cisneros and Vigoa to compare with blood found in the recovered getaway car used in the robbery.

Metro Police are also trying to identify additional suspects in the five robberies Cisneros and Vigoa are accused of, but Lt. John Alamshaw said he could not release much information this morning about the ongoing investigation.

Vigoa and Cisneros were arrested on a host of robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder charges connected to holdups in the Bellagio and New York-New York and armored car robberies outside the MGM Grand, Desert Inn and Mandalay Bay hotel-casinos.

"We believe we have the two who were involved in all of the robberies," he said. "The thought is that there may be a couple of others who were rotated into the robberies as the third man."

Detectives searched several homes and storage units Wednesday and recovered several guns, clothing believed to have been worn during the Bellagio robbery, dollar-value coins from several casinos and body armor.

Cisneros and Vigoa were held without bond after a Monday court hearing. Prosecutors say they will file the criminal complaint this week.

Perkins said the pair are the suspects in the Henderson slayings and he believes that filing murder charges is just a matter of waiting for forensic tests.

Metro Police had suspected the two men for at least several weeks in the series of casino robberies dating back two years. Detectives got a break last week when they compared a picture of Vigoa to a Bellagio surveillance video that captured images of the robbery. They also called his federal probation officer, who confirmed it was Vigoa.

Vigoa was sentenced to 86 months in a federal prison on a 1991 drug-related conviction. He was released from prison in December 1996 and put on five years supervised release, said Thomas Collins, supervising U.S. probation officer.

Vigoa's probation officer, Pedro Durazo, filed a petition in federal court claiming Vigoa violated the conditions of his release.

Durazo said in court papers he saw the video surveillance from the Bellagio robbery and identified Vigoa holding a firearm during the robbery.

Durazo wrote "given the offender's criminal background ... as well as being armed and suspected of being involved in other robberies, including one involving a double homicide, he is considered extremely dangerous."