Former building inspector sets fire, kills himself

A former inspector in charge of protecting some of Las Vegas' biggest buildings from fires set his home ablaze this week before killing himself, friends and family said.

Darrol Mosley, recently laid off from his well-paid position as a senior life safety systems manager for the Perini Building Co. and a former Las Vegas fire inspector, sent a suicide email to friends in the moments before he killed himself Wednesday morning.

"The end of my time, was the end of my job at Perini which was the end of my life," Mosley, in his 50s, wrote in the email. "May never get another life because of what I'm about to do. It would just follow my very (expletive) life. I hope no one gets hurt because of this."

The email was time stamped at 4:40 a.m. Wednesday, a few minutes before Clark County firefighters were called to Mosley's town home at the Garden Park Townhouse Association at 3737 E. Desert Inn Road.

The county coroner has not released Mosley's name or cause of death, but multiple people contacted by the Review-Journal confirmed the suicide note, in which Mosley blamed his ex-wife and former boss for his downward spiral.

"My dear friend Mark Caspers after years of telling me I would always be there with the company no matter what … Then when the time came he wouldn't take my call and even stood me up for a meeting he set up with me," he wrote.

Caspers, president and chief operating officer at Perini, said Friday that Mosley lost his job because of simple economics.

"We had just run out of work," he said.

"Darrol was just a wonderful human being and a great employee. This was horrifying, pretty mind-boggling. … We're all saddened, bothered by it."

But Mosley's ex-wife, Jorja Killion, said his friends and co-workers shouldn't be surprised about the suicide. There was a darker side of her husband's personality that few knew about, she said.

Killion said she met Mosley in the early 1990s when he was a Las Vegas fire inspector and she was a prostitute. Mosley was one of her clients, she said.

"He said he loved me, asked me to marry him," she said.

They tied the knot in 1996. Killion said she soon learned that her life wouldn't be changing. She said Mosley forced her to remain in the sex industry even as she pleaded with him to let her quit.

"His friends don't know who he was, who I was married to," Killion said in an angry, sometimes rambling interview. "My husband was a psychopath, a spoiled brat who manipulated me and who didn't get his way so he took a cowardly way out."

Court and police records confirmed that both Killion and Mosley were arrested in 1997 on charges related to prostitution, including pandering and living from the earnings of a prostitute.

Las Vegas Fire Department records show that Mosley ended his six-year stint as a fire inspector about a month after his arrest. It's unclear whether he resigned or was fired. Killion pleaded guilty to a felony, records show, but there wasn't a court case on file for Mosley.

She said that is because she refused to implicate her husband to police. She now says Mosley was a de facto pimp who arranged the jobs and controlled the money, often flying her to California, Arizona or Washington state to have sex with wealthy men for $5,000 a night.

She said that one of her clients was a well-known A-list producer.

"He wants to make a movie about my life," she said.

Killion said she knew her husband couldn't get a well-paying job with a felony on his record, so she took the fall. She wanted to stay with him even with his issues, she said.

Mosley accepted a job with Perini a few years later, finally getting the big salary he had been looking for, she said.

"I never realized how obsessed with money he was," she said. "I was naive. I loved that man."

Killion and Mosley divorced last year, and she moved to Utah, where the couple had bought a 4,000-square-foot home for $300,000.

Mosley remained in the couple's $80,000 town home, bought in 1998.

The couple had been involved in a long battle over finances. Two days before the fire, a private detective Killion hired had been following him, though the divorce had long been finalized.

"Then my ex wife tries to (expletive) me over every chance she can," Mosley wrote in the suicide note. "She can just (expletive) off."

One of Mosley's friends and former co-workers, contacted by the Review-Journal, said he was surprised to read about the fire because Mosley was a safety nut who would have never wanted to harm anyone.

"Darrol was the nicest guy you would ever know," said the friend, who asked to remain anonymous.

He knew of Mosley's trouble with the law and the accusations of prostitution. Mosley had always maintained his wife was only giving massages, the friend said.

"I find it hard to believe, but that was what he told me," he said.

The friend said Mosley's duties at Perini included last-phase safety inspections, checking things such as sprinklers, fire alarms and elevators to ensure they met local codes before the building opened.

"He was the final leg of the opening process," he said.

Perini confirmed that Mosley had no part in the unfinished Harmon Hotel structural defects controversy, which has kept the company in the news since CityCenter's opening in late 2009.

The friend said Killion was after her ex-husband's money because she didn't have a steady income of her own.

"She was a trippy lady, a real weird person," the friend said. "I have no doubt that he torched his place because it was filled with all her stuff."

Killion said she was going to Las Vegas even before she learned about Mosley's suicide. On May 1, she received a foreclosure notice for the couple's Utah home, and she wanted to take him back to court to find out where he was hiding his money, she said.

Mosley seemed to know about his ex-wife's impending troubles, writing in his note: "Hope she is homeless again."

Killion said her husband succeeded. Their town home is now unlivable, and she is staying at a hotel - paid for by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - without a dollar to her name.

"He got his wish," she said.

Contact reporter Mike Blasky at mblasky@review
journal.com or 702-383-0283.