Officers murdered in ‘revolution’
Motive unclear in killing of policemen and bystander, despite shooter’s remark and paraphernalia left at scene
Aman and a woman ambushed two police officers eating lunch at a Las Vegas restaurant, fatally shooting them at point-blank range before fleeing to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact.
The shooters walked into CiCi’s Pizza and gunned down Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, Las Vegas police officials said. One of the officers was able to fire back before he died, but it’s unclear if he hit the suspects.
One of the shooters yelled, “This is a revolution,” but a motive remains under investigation.
Las Vegas police spokesman Larry Hadfield said: “We don’t know anything about the suspects yet.”
But the cited police sources in reporting that the shooters draped the officers’ bodies with cloth showing a Revolutionary War-era flag and investigators found paraphernalia associated with white supremacists.
After shooting the officers, the suspects fled to the Wal-Mart across the street, where they killed a person inside the front door and exchanged gunfire with police before killing themselves, police said.
The female suspect shot the male suspect before killing herself, said Sheriff Doug Gillespie.
Beck had been with the department since 2001 and leaves behind a wife and three children. Soldo had been with the force since 2006 and is survived by a wife and baby, police said.
The said the shooters stripped the officers of their weapons, ammunition and badges, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the inves- tigation. They then covered the officers with something that featured the Gadsden flag, a yellow banner with a coiled snake above the words, “Don’t tread on Me.”
The newspaper said the flag is named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War general who designed it. It is an adopted symbol of the Tea Party movement.
Pauline Pacheco was shopping at Wal-Mart when she saw the armed man and grabbed her father to escape, KLAS-TV reported.
“We saw when the man was walking, he was shouting, yelling bad words, and suddenly he had a gun,” she told the station. “It was terrible, it was terrible. That man was crazy.”
Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill said the male suspect yelled “everyone get out” before shooting at WalMart. The suspects then walked to the back of the store.
Governor Brian Sandoval said he was devastated by the murders in an “act of senseless violence”.
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman called the killings a “cruel act” and praised the officers for dedicating “their lives to protecting all of us in our community”.