Las Vegas car dealer offering $50K reward for info in teen’s death
Longtime Las Vegas car dealer Jim Marsh said Friday he is offering a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for placing a cable over a bike trail that led to the death of a teen boy.
Marsh said he decided to put up the reward after reading about the demise of 16-year-old Angel Naranjo, who died early Sunday from a severe neck injury while driving a minibike on the Las Vegas Wash Trail in east Las Vegas.
“It’s so bad because an innocent person hit that,” Marsh said. “They did something so egregious to kill a young kid like that. It makes me sick.”
Marsh, 89, a local car dealer since 1971 and owner of Jim Marsh Kia, Jim Marsh Chrysler Jeep and the Henderson-based Skyline Casino, said he wanted to make the reward “substantial.”
“I have an idea that somebody out there knows who did this,” he said.
The reward money will likely be set aside in a trust account and withdrawn once someone furnishes information on a suspect who is arrested and convicted in Naranjo’s death, Marsh said.
Anyone with details about the alleged perpetrator and interested in collecting the reward may call his office at 702-946-1000.
Fundraisers set for Naranjo
According to an incident report by the Metropolitan Police Department, Naranjo was riding his minibike, a small version of a motorcycle, sometime after midnight Sunday on the off-road wash trail near the intersection of Pecos Road and East Lake Mead Boulevard.
His neck then struck “a cable tied to a pole from the fence across the pathway” and caused him to fall off of the bike.
His 19-year-old brother, who was riding a minibike behind him, witnessed the fatal collision, police reported.
Medical personnel who reached the boy found him dead at the scene and put his body into an ambulance before police arrived, the department reported.
“A hanging cable from the fence was observed over the west side of the fence,” police said.
The Clark County coroner’s office has not yet released the cause of the boy’s death.
Three different fundraisers are scheduled this weekend to help Naranjo’s family with his memorial expenses.
On Saturday, the school he attended, Equipo Academy at 4131 E. Bonanza Road, will have a kermes, or Latin cultural event selling tacos and other home-cooked food from 8 a.m. to when the food runs out, according to Rosa Garcia, the school’s dean of families.
On Sunday, the college prep charter school where the boy would have started the 10th grade on Monday, will have a car wash from 7 a.m. to noon to raise additional funds, Garcia said.
Another car wash fundraiser on Sunday, sponsored by the Las Vegas-based firm Byond Details, will run from noon to 5 p.m. in the parking lot at 3485 S. Rainbow Blvd. next to Burger King, according to organizer Steven Nava.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.
