No suspects arrested in string of weekend killings

Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2003 | 9:42 a.m.

There were still no suspects in custody late Monday in connection with any of the five homicides that occurred in four separate shootings during the weekend, Metro Police Homicide Lt. Tom Monahan said.

For hours late Saturday night and Sunday morning, homicide detectives literally rushed from one shooting to another. The homicides occurred within blocks of each other.

Two men were killed after a man left the Rock Club at Maryland Parkway near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and returned with a shotgun about 2 a.m. Sunday, Monahan said.

After gunfire erupted in the club's parking lot and police began arriving, one wounded man stumbled back into the club, collapsed and died, Monahan said. A second man died outside the club on the sidewalk.

The coroner's office identified one of the victims as Shaka Elam, 28, of North Las Vegas. The identity of the other victim was not released Monday afternoon.

Police were looking for a black man, medium height and medium build, with braided hair, based on witness accounts, Monahan said.

Two shootings had occurred in the same area hours earlier.

About 11:30 p.m. Saturday a man was found shot to death in an alley behind the 2500 block of Sherwood Street, near Karen Avenue and Maryland Parkway, police said.

Marco Torres, 30, was pronounced dead at the scene and the coroner's office said no address was listed for him.

About midnight a resident of the Paradise Village Way apartments at Tropicana and Eastern avenues heard gunfire and called police.

Patrol officers found the body of a 20-year-old man on a sidewalk. Paramedics pronounced the man dead from apparent gunshot wounds. The man's identity had not been released by the coroner's office late Monday.

About nine hours prior to that discovery, 19-year-old Tho Cao was shot and killed near Maryland Parkway and Reno Avenue, authorities said.

Cao was shot about 2:50 a.m. Saturday, and several of his friends tried to revive him, but paramedics pronounced Cao dead.

Witnesses said Cao had been fighting with two teens, one of whom pulled a handgun and shot at the man as he ran east into an alley. Cao was struck at least once in the back, police said.

"Five homicides in one weekend is a lot of murders," Metro Police spokeswoman Carla Alston said.

People who live in the neighborhood and some UNLV students expressed concern that the killings had taken place in areas around the school.

The area around Maryland Parkway at Tropicana was also setting for numerous killings in the late 1990s.

Convicted murderer Tony Amati is serving two terms of life in prison with possibility of parole plus two terms of 96 to 240 months for the 1996 shooting of 22-year-old Keith Dyer and the wounding of Dyer's friend, Stacie Dooley. Metro Police branded it a thrill killing.

Amati was arrested on a telephone tip less than a week after allegations of his involvement in a Las Vegas killing spree aired on the television show, "America's Most Wanted."

Dyer was killed Aug. 29, 1996, while walking a teenage fellow employee from Pizza Hut to her apartment near UNLV when they were approached by three men. Dyer died at the scene. The woman suffered a minor wound to her leg.

Three months earlier, on May 27, 1996, Michael John Matta, 27, was rummaging through Dumpsters in a condominium complex in the 5100 block of Gray Lane near Hacienda Avenue and Maryland Parkway when he was shot to death.

On July 28, 1996, John Garcia, 48, was shot in the head in his garage near Tropicana and Maryland Parkway.

In March of 1997 a frail 64-year-old man, who killed his two sons-in-law by shooting them as they sat in a van in front of a grocery store at Maryland and Tropicana, pleaded guilty in a deal that will keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Alberto Tayag's plea bargain offered few answers to the execution-style killings except that he had been in a fight with one of the victims.