Detective details Metro work on sex-assault cases

Kim Smith

Friday, Oct. 20, 2000 | 10:41 a.m.

A Las Vegas teen charged in a series of rapes and home invasions lived around the block from one of his alleged victims and within walking distance of most of the others.

Metro Police Detective Laura Andersen took the stand Thursday as Justin Porter's preliminary hearing continued before Justice of the Peace Nancy Oesterle.

Police believe Porter, 17, invaded 13 homes between Feb. 1 and June 9. In six of the incidents, women were sexually assaulted and in a seventh, a man was murdered.

Andersen said that as time went on detectives in the department's sexual assault and robbery unit quickly noticed similarities among their respective cases.

In almost all of the cases, the intruder kicked in the front door, Andersen said.

Additionally, all of the victims described the intruder as a black man in his early 20s who concealed his face and made sexual comments to the female victims, Andersen said. In all of the cases but one, the man held a knife in a his right hand. In the other case, he held a gun in his right hand.

The suspect always demanded cash and made disparaging sexual comments to the few male victims he came across, Andersen said.

The victims were similar in that most were elderly women who lived in apartments that were located in an area bordered by Eastern Avenue, Las Vegas Boulevard, Bonanza Road and Sahara Avenue, Andersen said.

Those working on the case decided to step up their efforts to find the suspect following a June 9 incident in which the suspect and an East Cedar Street resident got into a struggle for the suspect's gun, Andersen said. Four shots were fired, but no one was hit.

"I felt that somebody was going to end up being killed," Andersen said.

Andersen didn't know it, but just one day earlier casino employee and retired monk Gyaltso Lungtok, 31, had been shot to death in his 10th Street apartment after his door had been kicked in. Porter later would be charged with that murder.

Several detectives from the sexual assault unit and the robbery unit switched to the graveyard shift June 12 and saturated the downtown area, Andersen said. They then began interviewing dozens of people who matched the description of the suspect.

They also had fingerprint examiners working constantly, checking prints of those people interviewed to those taken from the crime scenes, Andersen said.

It was on the first night of their shift change that they came across Porter and received his mother's permission to get a DNA sample.

Andersen said that between June 12 and the time a positive match came back on Aug. 10, the invasions stopped. She later found out that Porter had left the area.

On Aug. 11 they also learned Porter's prints matched at least one of the home invasions, Andersen said. They conducted a search at his North 13th Street home and found shoes that matched prints left on at least one kicked-in door.

Andersen said one of Porter's alleged victims lived just one block from Porter's home, on East Ogden Avenue.

The preliminary hearing is scheduled to convene again on Oct. 30.