Maestas back in court

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 9:38 a.m.

Beau Maestas, indicted on battery by prisoner charges on Friday, was scheduled for arraignment before District Judge David Wall this morning.

Beau and his sister, Monique Maestas, are scheduled to be tried in April 2006 in connection with the January 2003 killing of 3-year-old Kristyanna Cowan and the stabbing of her then 10-year-old half-sister, Brittney Bergeron, in a trailer in the Casablanca hotel RV park in Mesquite.

Brittney was left paralyzed from the waist down.

Beau Maestas faces the new charge for allegedly fighting with two corrections officers at the Clark County Detention Center.

The incident occurred March 24. An officer wrote in a report that he saw Maestas pass contraband soup packets to another inmate by putting them under the inmate's door. When the officers confronted him, Maestas allegedly bent over and tried to pick up the packets, the report says. The officer stopped him and tried to guide him by the arm back to his cell, and Maestas allegedly began struggling violently.

At one point he became passive and the officers started to handcuff him, the report says, but he spun around and grabbed one of the officers' legs and attempted to lift and push him over the upper tier railing before he was stopped and placed in cuffs.

Authorities allege the Maestas siblings attacked the children after discovering that what the children's mother, Tamara Ann Schmidt, and her husband, John Schmidt, had sold them was not methamphetamine.

The Schmidts are facing charges of child abuse and neglect in connection with the stabbing attack. They were scheduled to stand trial either on July 25 before a senior judge or on March 27, 2006, before Mosley, but that could soon change.

Because a trial resulting from the deadly riot at the 2002 Laughlin River Run was rescheduled for July 25, it is unclear whether the Maestas' or Schmidts' cases will be returned to their original trial dates.

Mosley said because he changed the Laughlin River Run case to July he would be trying to reverse his postponement of the Maestas' case. Last week Mosley rescheduled the Maestas' trial from May 31 to April 10, 2006.

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