‘Help me, help me’: Witness describes west Las Vegas shooting
A witness working next to a west Las Vegas grocery store where a security guard was shot Saturday afternoon said she exited her check cashing shop after what sounded like gunfire.
“I heard two shots and went outside,” said Rosa Angeles, 48, manager of the Giro Azteca business at 840 N. Decatur Blvd., right next door to the Marketon store of the same address.
“We saw a man on the floor screaming, ‘help me, help me,’” Angeles said. “Everyone called 911 (saying) ‘come here, we have a shooting’ and then we came back into the store.”
A suspect has been arrested in the shooting, which occurred at 1 p.m. Saturday, but their name and the charges the person faces were not immediately available Sunday, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
The male victim apparently had been in a struggle with suspected shoplifters prior to the shooting, and the suspects fled the scene before police arrived, the department stated in a news release.
An employee of a nearby business, who declined to provide their name, said that they heard from a co-worker that a couple of people left with a basket of groceries outside the market and the guard was shot in the face while confronting them.
An assistant manager at Marketon, which offers mainly Hispanic foods, said that they heard that the security guard was going to survive his wound, but they also declined to be identified for this story.
Saeid Yousefi, 37, a cashier at an ARCO gas station and store in the same mini-mall, on Decatur at West Washington Avenue, said police came by to ask for possible surveillance video of the shooting, however, the business’ cameras all pointed forward, not in the rear of the building facing the scene.
The area suffers from an above average rate of crime, with shoplifters coming into the ARCO store and “a lot of police activity” in the vicinity of the intersection, Yousefi said.
Police, who did not provide much more in the way of details as of Sunday afternoon, stated that the investigation into the event was ongoing.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.