Police in Las Vegas released video footage of a road rage incident that turned deadly outside of a convenience store.
According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police on Nov. 15, officers responded to a store at the 1100 block of East Bonanza Road to investigate a shooting.
“The investigation indicated the victim and another man were in a vehicle driving southbound on Maryland Parkway and were approaching a green light at Bonanza Road. Two men were jaywalking across the street and the victim slowed down and had a verbal argument with them. The men continued walking across the street and into the parking lot of the convenience store,” said police in a statement.
The victim pulled his vehicle into a parking lot behind the two shooting suspects. While the suspects were in the store, the victim emerged from his vehicle and got into a fight.
“At some point during the fight, one of the suspects pulled out a gun and shot the victim. Both suspects then fled the scene on foot,” said the Las Vegas police.
The footage shows one of the men violently swinging and trying to take down one of the suspects. The suspect in a gray sweater then pulls out a pistol and apparently opens fire, although the footage doesn’t show the shooting.
Police described both suspects as black and between the ages of 18 and 22 years of age. They are both between 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 8 inches tall.
One suspect was wearing a grey sweater and black pants, and the other was last seen wearing a black jacket and a white T-shirt.
Murders on the Rise in Vegas
In 2017, Las Vegas saw its worst year for homicides, breaking its all-time record. The Las Vegas Police Department investigated 171 murders, which does not include the 58 people who died in the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting near the Mandalay Bay hotel. It’s an increase of three murders over 2016, when detectives investigated 168 homicides, reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.Other major cities also saw an increase in murders.
The 342 homicides notched last year in Maryland’s biggest city yielded a punishing homicide rate of 56 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report released Monday. Earlier this year, Baltimore had announced 343 slayings for the year, but three deaths were reclassified, eventually bringing the total to 342 in the city of roughly 615,000 inhabitants. The per capita rate was a record high for the city.
Among major U.S. cities, Baltimore was followed in the FBI’s annual tally by Detroit, which last year recorded a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000 people; Memphis, Tennessee, with a rate of 28 per 100,000; and Chicago, with a rate of 24 per 100,000. But some smaller cities reported a higher homicide rate than Baltimore’s. St. Louis, with a population slightly over 300,000, had a rate of 66 murders per 100,000 people.
