Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

North Las Vegas Police alerted to suicide note, but respond too late

0929nappers

Contributed Photo

Sisters Lisa and Veda Napper are shown with their parents in an undated photo.

It was a suicide note written with the thoughtfulness of someone who wanted to be sure the person reading it didn’t take the two deaths personally.

“We’d like to THANK YOU for taking the time to read our e-mail ... and we would like to say we’re sorry (please forgive us) but we didn’t know who else to e-mail. We have no friends, neighbors or family that we could trust to do what we feel needs to be done.”

“We hope you will help two strangers — who are very sorry for adding any stress to your life — to get cremated,” it concluded. “Thanks again for helping us.”

Those were among the last words from sisters Lisa C., 59, and Veda A. Napper, 58, who faxed their request to the ACLU of Nevada at 9:59 a.m. Sept. 23. They would have sent the note directly to the North Las Vegas Police Department, they added in a “P.S.”, but “it would have gone instantly to them.”

When ACLU general counsel Allen Lichtenstein read the “P.S.,” his first thought was that the two didn’t send the note to police because they had planned a suicide that might take time. He was thinking pills, perhaps. So maybe there would be time to save the women — if police acted fast and decisively. But that didn’t happen.

Lichtenstein called 911 and was connected with the North Las Vegas Police Department. He read someone the note, which included the sisters’ address. Lichtenstein asked if police also wanted it faxed to them, but he said he was told “no.”

Police went to the home at 10:19 a.m., department spokesman Sgt. Tim Bedwell said. But when officers couldn’t find an open door or window, they decided to return later in the day when neighbors home from work could provide more information on the residents.

Lichtenstein said the department called his office and finally asked for a copy of the cremation request/suicide note. Then at 2:25 p.m., a woman from the police department called the ACLU office again and asked if the Nappers were dead. Paula Newman, who took the call, said as soon as she knew the call was about the Nappers, she asked, “Are they dead?”

The woman told Newman, she said, “Well, we don’t know. There was no answer when we knocked on the door.”

Newman recalled this week that she replied, “Well, break in ... you’re the police.”

She said the woman told her police didn’t have authorization, and asked whether the ACLU knew the women or had any family contact information.

Newman said she would fax the letter to the police that explained the sisters had no family, but the woman said police had it.

Bedwell said that based only upon the letter, police did not have the right to break into the home.

“The officers didn’t feel they had established enough probable cause to force their way in,” he said. Police at the scene and their supervisors are responsible for looking at the “totality of circumstances” because “people don’t have to open the door just because police knock on it.”

On average, the department gets 20 calls a day for welfare checks or attempted suicides, Bedwell added. Most of the calls come from those who would attempt suicide, or relatives, which is usually enough for police to force their way in. Of the other calls, “we have to make that decision and it can be dangerous,” he said.

When police returned to the Nappers’ house in late afternoon, neighbors told them that when the Nappers’ car is there, it means the women are home. The car was there. “We considered that probable cause and we did break into the home,” Bedwell said.

Police got into the home just after 6 p.m. Inside, they found the Napper sisters, dead.

The coroner declared them dead of asphyxia at 8:05 p.m. They were found in their beds, plastic bags over their heads, with helium being pumped into the bags.

“We are treating it as a double suicide,” Bedwell added. “It’s very sad. And clearly with hindsight, we wish we would have opened that door.”

The sisters’ note gives some insight into their thinking.

“The added stress of our failing eyesight due to complications from diabetes (as well as other ailments) has made this our only choice. Our Mommy and Daddy are already in heaven and since we had to put our Baby Flit (our puppy) to death ... his death finally broke our already breaking hearts ... we just got tired of trying — without any monetary encouragement (which unfortunately seems to be the only thing in this life that has any worth).”

One neighbor, who did not want to be identified, said he didn’t know the sisters, adding that in years past, they might wave hello to him, but they were rarely seen outside their house anymore.

Public records indicate their father, Herschel, died in 2005; mother, Evelyn, died in August 2009.

“It’s sad,” the neighbor said. “It makes you wish you’d be able to do something, or had known. Or knew them better.”

What makes it more heartbreaking, said Polly McLean, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, is that she had recently discovered that the two sisters did, in fact, have long-lost relatives.

McLean, a journalism professor, has spent the past eight years researching a book about the Napper sisters’ great aunt, Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, who in 1918 graduated with a German degree from the University of Colorado, the institution’s first black female graduate. The Napper sisters also graduated from the university with degrees in art, McLean said.

McLean learned of the Nappers in North Las Vegas three years ago. Family members are descendants of freed slaves who came to Colorado in the late 1800s from Virginia. Twice, McLean said, she came to North Las Vegas to talk to the sisters, but no one would answer the door.

McLean also wrote letters and sent them Christmas flowers; she last received a response in 2009.

“I think they were kind of reclusive,” she said.

But she persisted, and she had one more letter to send them. This one had the astounding news that McLean found Napper relatives in Virginia. On Labor Day this year, in fact, she flew there and talked to them. She recounted that meeting in the letter, hoping that the sisters might one day finally meet their relatives.

She simply hadn’t sent the letter yet. She intended to, when she got the call from police last week.

“I’m totally devastated by this,” she said. “I really think they didn’t know they had family.”

The Virginia relatives, she added, plan to come to North Las Vegas in October to oversee the sisters’ cremation.

Sun researcher Rebecca Clifford-Cruz contributed to this report.

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