3 adults, 3 juveniles arrested in armed robberies across Las Vegas Valley

Three adults and three juveniles were arrested in connection with a string of armed robberies that took place across the valley in recent months.

Las Vegas police said they made the last arrest in the case, called the “Hog-Leg Series” in a police report, earlier this week.

Three arrestees were not named by officials because they are juveniles. Andrew Perez, 18, Jacqueline Zambrano, 20, and Kimberly Zenteno, 19, are being held without bail at the Clark County Detention Center. The charges they will face vary by suspect, but include armed robbery and burglary, conspiracy, and attempted murder. The robberies occurred in North Las Vegas and Las Vegas and weren’t concentrated in particular neighborhoods.

Capt. David O’Leary of the Metropolitan Police Department’s theft crimes bureau, said the department worked with the FBI and the interagency major violators unit on the case.

On June 5, in one of nine robberies starting in May that police connected to the suspects, a 7-Eleven clerk was shot in the head.

Two men with bandanna-covered faces entered the convenience store at 4160 E. Sahara Ave. about 2 a.m. Police had said they shot the clerk for “$26 and cigarettes.”

The clerk was taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in critical condition. Police said Thursday that the man had recovered enough to walk around his hospital room.

“He’s fortunate,” O’Leary said.

The suspected shooter was just days from his 16th birthday, O’Leary said. The other juveniles are 17 years old.

After that, the crew grew in numbers. Its members began wearing masks that covered their entire faces in subsequent robberies, police said.

Some of the suspects have gang associations, but the robberies weren’t gang-motivated, O’Leary said. Not every suspect participated in every robbery, but Zambrano, whom police called the getaway driver, was the most consistently involved.

“We have confessions from all of those individuals,” he said. “To some degree or another, they all tended to point the finger at each other along the way.”

O’Leary said five search warrants were executed, and police recovered property from the robbery sites. Police are still testing the firearms that were recovered, but O’Leary said he thinks police found the gun used to shoot the clerk.

The department created a second team of robbery investigators while working the case. Surveillance videos and tips from the public helped the department close the case quickly, O’Leary said.

Seeing the clerk shot in surveillance footage helped motivate investigators, O’Leary said.

“It took our breath away,” he said. “We all felt it. We wanted immediately to make this right.”

Contact Wesley Juhl at wjuhl@reviewjournal.com and 702-383-0391. Find @WesJuhl on Twitter.