Man arrested in wife’s shooting death

A Las Vegas man was arrested Thursday in the shooting death of his wife, who had filed for divorce seven weeks earlier.

The shooting occurred after a struggle over a gun in the garage of the woman’s home on the 9000 block of College Green Street, near Durango Drive and Blue Diamond Road, Las Vegas police said.

Police said the call came in just after 7:50 a.m., and the woman died at St. Rose Dominican Hospital, San Martin campus, about 8:45 a.m.

John Fitzgerald Gonzalez, 51, was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on a murder charge, police said.

Metropolitan Police Department homicide Lt. Dan Mcgrath said the victim owned the home. Property records list the owner as Nicole Nguyen, who bought the house in March. She was 41, according to court records.

Clark County Family Court records show that Nguyen filed for divorce from Gonzalez on Sept. 25., and the couple were present during an Oct. 25 hearing before Judge Art Ritchie. They had been married since February 2010, court records show.

In a motion filed the same day she filed for divorce, Nguyen asked for sole legal and physical custody of the couple’s son, citing concerns for his safety.

“The father is aggressive and threatening and the judge should order that he be evaluated for anger issues,” Nguyen wrote.

Nguyen also wrote that Gonzalez took their young son out of school for three days in September and would not allow her to see the boy. She found him at Gonzalez’s mother’s house.

“He is hiding my son from me,” she wrote.

According to the motion, Nguyen was not seeking child support from Gonzalez, who was not working.

“I am only concerned about the safety of my son,” the mother wrote.

After the shooting, Gonzalez initially told police he was picking his 6-year-old son up for school at the home when his estranged wife

ARREST

“That’s when I first realized that this is real, and I started to cry,” he said. He told his younger brother their mom and sister were dead. “He didn’t really understand. He was just 4.”

The next morning, Cristopher, then 9, told his brother not to walk to his preschool. He got himself ready for school and walked to Hoggard Elementary School, where his fourth-grade teacher saw him sobbing and asked what was wrong.

“My mom and sister are dead,” he told her. “They’ve been murdered.”

A police officer took Cristopher home, where the police discovered the bloody scene. Arturo Martinez, who had fought off the attacker, suffered severe brain damage and was taken to University Medical Center. He wasn’t immediately able to make statements.

In the weeks since the trial started, prosecutors have argued that Clay broke into the family home on Robin Street in the early morning hours and used a claw hammer to attack the two, along with Arturo Martinez, while the boys slept through the nightmare.

Clay, now 27, was arrested within 10 days, after detectives tracked phone records linking him to a stolen phone following a sexual assault that occurred less than a mile from and within hours of the killings.

He told police he was drunk and high on ecstasy and PCP at the time and did not recall the killings.

His attorneys, Tony Sgro and Chris Oram, have challenged the minimal fingerprints linked to Clay, the lack of bloody shoe prints, and whether the 50-year-old sexual assault victim picked the right photo out of a lineup.

On Thursday, Oram suggested that the family’s ongoing feud with their neighbors, who sometimes parked their car in front of the Martinez’ driveway and had done so the night of the murders, could be another motive.

Detective Dean O’kelley of the Metropolitan Police Department testified that it was an ongoing neighbor dispute, one that would be disproportional to the crime committed.

“You’ve seen people kill for what could fit in a crack pipe, right?” Oram asked him Thursday. “You’ve probably spent a good deal of time shaking your head, saying, ‘My goodness, for a $20 bag of weed? This is why somebody died.’ Murder makes no sense, doesn’t it?”

O’kelley responded, “Sometimes it does.”

Oram berated O’kelley for not testing the DNA on a bloody tissue or a condom located outside the home. He asked the detective why he didn’t further investigate why the

family’s American bulldog, which Cristopher Martinez testified was a puppy that was sick and locked up at the time, didn’t bark at an intruder.

Oram argued there was no sign of forced entry, and he questioned whether all the doors in the home were locked, noting that Cristopher testified one of the locks on the front door was unlocked when he woke up, and he didn’t know how it got that way.

Clark County District Attorney Pam Weckerly argued that didn’t make a difference.

“If we know that the doors had been locked, would that change the fact that you had been told by the analysts that Clay’s sperm had been found on the two homicide victims?” She asked O’kelley.

“No,” he responded.

The trial continues at noon Friday at the Regional Justice Center.

Contact Briana Erickson at berickson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5244. Follow @brianarerick on Twitter.