Another arrest in shooting of teen
A third teenager has been arrested in the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy in Henderson last week, police said.
Detectives tracked down the teen and arrested him late Wednesday near Warm Springs and Pecos roads, Henderson Police Department spokesman Scott Williams said.
The teen faces charges “along the lines” of destroying evidence and accessory to murder, Williams said. Police didn’t release his identity because he is a minor.
He joins Jaiden Caruso,
16, and Kody Harlan, 17, as suspects in the homicide of Matthew Minkler, 17, who was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head late Friday in an abandoned house on the 2000 block of Cool Lilac Avenue.
“I’m very, very thankful that the police are taking such swift action on this,” Matthew’s mother, Jamie Shanklin, said in a phone interview Thursday. Prosecutors charged
ARREST
Caruso and Harlan as adults. Caruso faces charges of murder with a deadly weapon and robbery, and Harlan faces charges of robbery and aiding a felony offender after the fact, court records show.
Officers are pushing to have the third teen charged as an adult, Williams said.
Harlan told police that Caruso pulled out a Ruger .357-caliber revolver and shot Matthew in the face during a modified game of Russian roulette, a version of the game where Caruso “never allowed the other participants to handle the firearm or pull the trigger themselves,” according to arrest documents.
Matthew’s family doesn’t believe that explanation.
“We know this wasn’t Russian roulette,” Shanklin told the Las Vegas Review-journal on Wednesday. “My kid was shot in the chin, like they were shutting him up.”
According to the pair’s arrest report, Caruso and Harlan returned to the house shortly after the shooting, but only to clean up the scene and hide the body inside a downstairs closet under a plastic sheet. Harlan is accused of dragging the body into the closet.
“They never called 911,” detectives wrote in the report. “They never attempted to render aid.”
The homicide investigation began June 8 after Henderson officers tried to pull over a stolen vehicle driven recklessly by Harlan near Sunset Road and Green Valley Parkway, the report shows.
When the car blew through a red light and crashed at the intersection, five juveniles inside the car got out and ran, police said. Once in custody,