3 people found dead at northwest Las Vegas Valley apartment

Three people are dead after what Las Vegas police are calling a double homicide-suicide Monday in the northwest valley.

Investigators think a man fatally shot a woman and another man before turning a gun on himself in an apartment complex near North Buffalo Drive and West Lake Mead Boulevard, Metropolitan Police Department homicide Lt. Ray Spencer told reporters.

About 11:30 a.m., paramedics notified police of a man’s body outside an apartment in the 2100 block of Echo Bay, and officers discovered two more bodies in the apartment, a woman’s on the floor near a bedroom and a man’s on a couch.

The man on the couch had a rifle in his lap and an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Spencer said.

“I’m confident that the person who committed the crime is the person sitting on the sofa with the rifle,” Spencer said.

A person walking through the complex found a man lying near the doorway of an apartment and called 911. Paramedics determined that the man had been shot and called Metro.

Police noticed a rifle casing next to the man’s body and knocked on the nearby apartment door to see whether he had a connection to the apartment. After minutes of knocking without a response, officers kicked a hole in the door while trying to kick it down, Spencer said.

“At that point, they looked through the door and they noticed that there were two more people deceased inside the apartment,” Spencer said.

Neighbors told police that the woman and the man found near the doorway may have lived at the apartment. A motive wasn’t clear early in the investigation, Spencer said, but detectives were examining the possibility of a relationship aspect.

Spencer said it wasn’t clear whether the man in the doorway had been shot there, but it appeared that the rifle had been fired there because of the casing next to his body.

Further details were limited, Spencer said, as investigators were waiting on a search warrant to enter the apartment.

“Looking in from the outside, there doesn’t appear to be (signs of) a struggle that we can see at this point,” Spencer said.

The deaths of the man outside the apartment and the woman represent the 126th and 127th homicides investigated by Metro this year, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal records.

The Clark County coroner’s office will release the identities of the deceased, as well as their causes and manners of death, after their families are notified.

Contact Mike Shoro at mshoro@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Follow @mike_shoro on Twitter. Contact Blake Apgar at bapgar@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter.