Kidnapping added to fire captain’s charges
Prosecutors announced plans to add a first-degree kidnapping charge in the domestic violence case against a Las Vegas fire captain after his wife testified Monday that he rejected her screams for medical help.
Sheldon Plehn, 37, already faces charges of domestic battery with substantial bodily harm, assault and coercion.
Jaclyn Plehn testified during a preliminary hearing that the couple had discussed divorce for several months before he threatened her on the evening of Dec. 8.
Shesaidshelefttheirhomeinher Jeep, and he chased after her in his Model S Tesla, forcing her off the road, blocking her vehicle against a Joshua tree and yanking her out.
“I was screaming ‘help,’” she told Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Elana Lee Graham.
He grabbed her phone and smashed it, the woman said, before pulling her hair, covering her mouth with his hand and wrapping his arm around her neck.
She said she hit her head and started to bleed when he tried to shove her into the passenger side of her vehicle.
She said she screamed, “How could you do this to me?” She said she then asked him to call 911, but he refused and climbed into the driver’s seat of her vehicle, and she ran back toward their home.
Defenseattorneytompitaro tried to show, through the woman’s testimony and text messages, that she was suicidal. Pitaro also tried to show that her husband, a firefighter and paramedic, had offered to treat her.
When the lawyer pressed her, she said, “I wasn’t actually suicidal. I was doing that so he wouldn’t come after me to hurt me.”
Pitaro asked whether her husband knew she carried a gun in her purse, andshesaidhedid.
That night, Jaclyn Plehn flagged down a couple driving east on Cold Creek Road toward U.S. Highway 95 and asked them to dial 911.
As the couple pulled over, a man — whom police later identified as Sheldon Plehn — was screaming at his wife to get back into her car. But the couple told the woman to get into their vehicle, and they sped off.