Police suspect links to gangs

Locals with gang ties are likely to blame for the Sunday morning brawl on the Strip that ended with four bystanders suffering from gunshot wounds, Las Vegas police said Monday.

Police are distributing surveillance video images of some of the men involved in the fight and asking for the public's help in identifying them.

Las Vegas police Capt. Curtis Williams said the department takes security on the Strip "extremely seriously." He predicted the gunman in the weekend shooting and "everyone that was involved" in the melee that led up to the shots "will have charges brought against them."

Since July, the Strip has seen three cases of gunfire involving more than one victim in each case. No one was killed in any of the shootings, and each of the men charged is a Las Vegas resident.

About 1 a.m. on July 6, 51-year-old Steven Zegrean opened fire from a mezzanine at New York-New York, wounding four people, authorities allege. Zegrean later told police he was upset that he lost his job and wanted police to shoot and kill him, according to his arrest report.

Just after 4 a.m. on Aug. 4, 34-year-old Richard Earl Shepherd opened fire at Caesars Palace after he got into a fight with a man who had made comments about Shepherd's sister, authorities allege. Shepherd shot two people who were not involved in the fight, police said.

Williams didn't draw any conclusions from the recent spate of shootings along one of the world's most famous stretches of real estate.

"These things are happening all over the valley. It's just not the Strip. The Strip is the one that causes more attention than anyplace else," he said.

In Sunday's case, about 20 men got into a fight in front of Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville about 3:15 a.m. after two of them had bumped into each other, police said. The men were began throwing punches, bottles and cans at each other.

During the fight, one of the men pulled out a gun and fired four or five shots toward the neighboring O'Shea's casino, striking four bystanders including at least one tourist.

The victims suffered minor gunshot wounds to their legs. One victim, a woman from California, remained hospitalized Monday, police said.

Williams said that because so many people are on the Strip in the summer, during the peak tourism season, the area has three times as many officers as it has during other times of the year. But an increased police presence can't stop all random acts of violence.

Police will review all of the major incidents that have occurred on the Strip to see whether there are ways to prevent similar crimes from occurring, but such prevention might prove to be very tough to accomplish, Williams said.

"You can't predict someone that loses a job is going to end up doing something like he (Zegrean) did. You can't predict that someone gets jealous over his girlfriend and decides that the way to resolve this is to put an explosive device (on a vehicle)," he said.

The reference to an explosive device was regarding an internationally publicized slaying on the Strip three months ago. On May 7, 24-year-old Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio was killed by a homemade bomb in the parking garage of the Luxor resort.

The negative publicity of high-profile crime on the Strip hasn't appeared to harm tourism in Las Vegas, said Erika Pope, spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. People "continue to perceive Las Vegas as a safe place to visit," she said.

The LVCVA didn't have tourism statistics for July and August. The most recent visitor tally available is for June, and the 3,282,315 total was about 4 percent more than the total for June 2006.

Alan Feldman, spokesman for MGM Mirage, which owns Luxor and New York-New York, said the evidence that Las Vegas remains a safe place to visit is overwhelming: Millions of tourists come here and return home safely.

He said MGM-Mirage's Strip properties have hundreds of surveillance cameras and upwards of 200 security officers each, and those precautions prevent most shootings and many other crimes.

But, Feldman added, "100 percent prevention is probably an unreasonable goal."