Suspect in 2017 slaying outside church extradited from Ohio
Artavius Robinson thought he had shot a cocaine dealer, police records show.
As it turns out, the victim was a 45-year-old churchgoeronhiswaytoanearly-morning service.
It was still dark out the morning of Oct. 16, 2017, when Iglesia La Luz del Mundo members heard a single gunshot just outside the central Las Vegas church, at Eastern and Cedar avenues. In the road, they found Hector Antonio Lemus-flores lying next to a Bible, his car door left wide open.
Lemus-flores was taken to University Medical Center and died about a half-hour later from the wound to his chest. The Clark County coroner’s office ruled his death a homicide.
More than a year went by before Robinson was taken into Las Vegas police custody. He and his girlfriend fled to Sandusky, Ohio, about three weeks after the shooting, according to his arrest report.
Robinson, 20, was being held without bail Thursday at the Clark County Detention Centerononecountofmurderwithadeadlyweapon, jail records show.
At the scene, churchgoers told police that when they rushed outside after hearing the gunshot, they did not see any suspects or cars leaving the area, a residential neighborhood bordered by busy Eastern Avenue.
“It’s a challenging event right now without any witnesses, but we’ll knock on
SUSPECT
every door on this street to see if we can get a description,” then-metropolitan Police Department homicide Lt. Dan Mcgrath said just outside the crime scene.
Those efforts turned up at least one Cedar Avenue resident who provided a possible suspect description: black man, 5-foot-8, 150 pounds.
The witness said that, while waiting at a bus stop, he had seen a man covering his face with a sweatshirt running from the church shortly after the gunshot went off, detectives detailed in Robinson’s report.
Police later learned that Robinson had run back to a nearby apartment, where, at the time, he was staying with his girlfriend. When he woke up around noon, police still were outside investigating.
But detectives did not have a name for the suspect — until an anonymous tipster reported that a man known only as Tay “was rumored to have jacked a Hispanic dude in the area of Cedar Avenue and Eastern Avenue,” the report states. Tay later was identified as Robinson via phone records.
In the weeks following the shooting, several others came forward, identifying “Tay” as the suspect and providing police with addresses where he and his girlfriend could be staying. One of those addresses led detectives to an apartment where the couple had stayed for a short time after the shooting, but the two had left for Ohio by the time police knocked on the door on Nov. 18, 2017, the report shows.
The detectives then reached out to the Sandusky Police Department, which, over the course of about six months, helped Metro close its case by obtaining Robinson’s DNA sample in early September. Months earlier, he had refused to give a DNA sample when Las Vegas detectives traveled to Ohio to interview his girlfriend and him, the report states.
During that six-month period, Robinson was arrested by Ohio police in connection with a domestic-related kidnapping involving his girlfriend.
While being held at the Erie
County Jail on charges related to the kidnapping, according to the report, Robinson admitted to another inmate that he had shot a man “who he suspected was carrying cocaine.”
Investigators believed the inmate’s statement, which he wrote on a piece of paper and later gave to police, “to be accurate since some of the details provided by Robinson were only known to detectives or the perpetrator,” detectives wrote in the report.
Robinson’s arrest report does not elaborate on the results of the DNA testing. It is not clear whether the results were pending on Oct. 10, when a warrant for his arrest was granted.
He was extradited to Las Vegas on Sunday, court records show. His preliminary hearing is set for Nov. 27.