A man armed with two axes was fatally shot by police during a confrontation at an east Las Vegas Valley home, police said Sunday morning.
The landlord for the house on Shreve Avenue said the only person who was supposed to be living there was 62-year-old Steven Allen Price, who moved in Wednesday. The Clark County coroner’s office hasn’t released the victim’s name.
Kelly McMahill of the Metropolitan Police Department said officers responded just after 11 p.m. Saturday to the 5200 block of Shreve Avenue, near Lake Mead and Nellis boulevards. A security guard had called Las Vegas police to report “a man was acting erratically and attacking him with a shovel.”
“Our officers arrived on the scene and immediately made contact with the male that the security guard was in a fight with,” said McMahill, captain of Metro’s Office of Internal Oversight and Constitutional Policing.
The officers, McMahill said, repeatedly ordered the man to drop his weapons, but he did not.
“And he refused, at which point he exited his house and he appeared to have a weapon in each one of his hands,” she said. “The officers again made multiple commands for him to drop his weapons and he again refused.”
She said one officer fired a “less lethal” shotgun — which fires beanbags — in the suspect’s direction, and almost simultaneously, the second officer fired a handgun at the suspect.
“It appears at the same time as the officers were firing their weapons, the suspect threw the items he was holding in his hands,” McMahill said. “At this point, we believe those to be a small ax and a larger pickax that are back at the scene.”
Maria Armendariz lives with her family next door to the house. Three rounds hit her home. One round went through the wall and struck the bottom of the stairs inside the house. Another pierced the wall outside her daughter’s upstairs bedroom, she said.
She said she saw the man follow and hit her husband’s truck as he exited the front gate of the neighborhood earlier Saturday. She called police to report the incident, she said. When her husband returned later that night, the couple saw the man confronting the security guard and called police again.