The first time Alonso Perez ran from police, it took the North Las Vegas Police Department nearly a week to find him.
He had been accused in the fatal shooting of a 31-year-old man who, according to witnesses, was attacked because he did not open the door for a woman at a McDonald’s. Police were called to the scene in the middle of the night on Aug. 27, but the suspect – later identified as Perez – had already fled.
Six days later, police found him.
Authorities arrested Perez, 25, at about 10 a.m. Friday morning and took him to the department’s detective bureau in North Las Vegas, a suite in a strip mall building also home to the Urban League and a Veterans Affairs hospital. For nearly three hours, Perez remained in police custody. Officers led him to an interrogation room. He was handcuffed.
At about 12:45 p.m., the police left Perez alone.
It’s not an uncommon questioning tactic, for a detective to walk out of the room mid-interview. Usually, the suspect is continually monitored, through surveillance video or a one-way mirrored window.
Perez, it appears, was not.
Somehow, in the time he was left alone, Perez turned his wrists until the steel handcuffs immobilizing his arms snapped altogether, police said in a statement. Free from his restraints, the suspect escaped from the detective bureau undetected.
“It’s pretty darn hard to break a set of handcuffs like this,” Phil Ramos, private detective and retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police homicide investigator, told NBC affiliate News 3. “If there’s a way to break them, you’ll likely break a bone in your hand if you’re able to snap these. They don’t move very well at all.”
In its statement, police did not say how long Perez was left alone or how he managed to elude several levels of security.
He managed to escape the complex, authorities said, by stealing a 2016 Ford F-250 pickup truck from a nearby parking lot. The truck was later recovered in the Las Vegas area, police said, and returned to the owner.
Perez, however, has not yet been relocated.
Police consider the man, described as 200 pounds and 6 foot 3, armed and dangerous. He has with black hair, brown eyes and a goatee and was last seen wearing dark shorts, black shoes and a white sports jersey with two blue stripes on the sleeves and the number 21 on the front and back.
He has a three inch “Air Jordan” logo tattooed on the left side of his neck.
Perez is the suspect in a fatal shooting that took place at about 11:45 p.m. the night of Aug. 27, according to police. Witnesses and the family of the victim, 31-year-old Mohammad Robinson, told News 3 that that Robinson was shot after an altercation with a woman for whom he did not open the McDonald’s door. The woman, News 3 reported, told a man accompanying her, and that man pulled out a gun and shot Robinson.
“It doesn’t make any sense why would you actually take someone’s life over not opening a door,” Miniya Sampson, Robinson’s 14-year-old daughter, told News 3.
“It’s horrible,” she said. “I want my dad back and you took him away from me.”
According to a fundraising page set up by Robinson’s family, the man was a “loving, caring, hardworking” father of four and stepdad to two “who did anything and everything he could to support his family.”
Robinson was transported to University Medical Center in critical condition, Fox 5 Vegas reported, but died Sunday morning.
Robinson’s sister, Maggie Robinson, told News 3 she was outraged that the man she believes killed her brother was able to get away.
“How can you let him escape?” Maggie Robinson told News 3. “I don’t understand it at all.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Katie Mettler
