Homicide’s ingredients included handgun, alcohol, panic and confession, police say

By Jackie Valley

Wednesday, May 23, 2012 | 12:31 p.m.

A man who confessed Tuesday to killing a teen girl said he accidentally shot her once in the head, then panicked and shot her again, according to an arrest report released Wednesday.

Metro Police said Ricardo Perez, 19, walked into the Clark County Detention Center on Tuesday afternoon and alerted officers to the homicide. Perez was arrested on counts of battery with a deadly weapon, murder with a deadly weapon and unrelated traffic warrants. He was booked into the Clark County Detention Center, where he remains without bail.

Accompanied by his mother, sister and girlfriend, Perez told detectives he came to turn himself in because “it was the right thing to do,” according to the arrest report.

Perez said he drank 25 to 30 beers Monday night at a friend’s house in the 6200 block of Sahara Avenue. At some point, Perez contacted another friend — identified in the report as 18-year-old Breana Lynn Carasik-McGee — that night, and she joined them, the report states.

Perez told detectives he took his mother’s semiautomatic handgun earlier in the day and brought it to his friend’s house, where he proceeded to play with it. As they left the house, Perez started playing with the gun again and accidentally fired it, hitting Carasik-McGee in the back of the head, according to the report.

Perez said Carasik-McGee had been walking ahead of him toward their vehicles.

“Perez said he was scared and confused,” according to the arrest report. “He said he ended up driving out to Henderson and went to the far end of College Drive.”

That’s where he took Carasik-McGee’s body out of his car, at which point he heard her making “grunting noises,” the report said.

Perez told detectives “he could not take it any more,” so he pointed the gun at Carasik-McGee’s head and shot again, the report said. Perez left the body, drove away and returned to an apartment complex near Boulder Highway and Russell Road, where he lives with his mother, sister and girlfriend.

Perez said he didn’t take Carasik-McGee to a hospital because he “panicked” and assumed she would die anyway from the first shot to her head, police noted in the report.

The suspect’s mother, sister and girlfriend told police Perez had confessed to the killing earlier Tuesday and had given them similar stories, according to the report.

Investigators found Carasik-McGee’s body in a desert area south of College Drive at the bottom of a 20-foot ravine, police said.

Detectives found what appeared to be two gunshot wounds on Carasik-McGee’s body, but their locations were not consistent with Perez’s story, police said.