Monday, Aug. 19, 2002 | 10:02 a.m.
A Las Vegas man acquitted of murder last year was indicted Thursday in connection with the beating and the torture of a victim with bug spray and rubbing alcohol.
According to an indictment unsealed Friday, Avery Allen Church Jr., 25, faces eight criminal counts, including attempted murder and first-degree kidnapping. Rene Ronald Ross was indicted on the same charges.
A man told police that Church and Ross knocked him unconscious when he opened his door on July 29. When he awoke, the man said, he was being beaten and dragged around his home by a nylon rope around his neck.
As they beat him, the man said, Church and Ross repeatedly asked him where the money was, police records show. The beating continued when he told them he didn't know what they were talking about.
According to police reports, Ross poured both rubbing alcohol and Raid on Church's wounds and went through the home looking for a lighter.
After forcing him to his knees, the man told police, Ross stabbed him in the head with a 4-inch folding buck knife.
The man fell over and played dead. As Ross and Church left the home, he said, he ran out the back door, jumped a fence and called 911 from a neighbor's house.
Upon his arrest Ross told police the dispute was over drugs and money, police records show. Church declined to give a statement to police.
Both men will be arraigned in District Court Aug. 21 by District Judge Joseph Bonaventure.
Defense attorney Pete Christiansen, who represented Church during a June 2001 murder trial, was unavailable for comment Friday. Deputy Public Defender Craig Davis, who is on the record as Church's attorney for the current case, was not available for comment this morning.
At the end of his earlier trial Church was acquitted on murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and burglary charges filed in the September 1999 death of Paulo Cornejo.
Chief Deputy District Attorney L.J. O'Neale told jurors that Cornejo, 24, and Church robbed the manager of the Rochelle Manor Apartments near Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway and fled.
The manager, William Gifford, who had been bound with duct tape, had freed himself and chased after the men with a .38-caliber weapon, intending to confront them in the parking lot.
He ended up shooting Cornejo to death, he said, when Cornejo reached for a weapon. Defense attorneys pointed out Cornejo was shot in the back of the head and the back.
Nevada law allows a co-defendant involved in a crime that ends in death to be charged with the death, even if he wasn't involved in the slaying.
Jurors said after the acquittal that the state didn't prove its case, and that Gifford should also have been charged in the slaying.
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