‘Looks just like him’: CSN worker recognized suspect in triple homicide

A College of Southern Nevada employee said campus police declined to remove Spencer McDonald from the English Department lobby while he was a student after he kept staring at her and acted strangely over several days in March.

The employee, who asked to be identified as Nina, was taken aback this week when she saw in local media reports a police booking photo of McDonald, arrested Tuesday after three people were found dead in a Las Vegas apartment. That was the man she took pictures of and reported to her supervisor.

“He was acting very weird,” Nina said of his behavior in the lobby of CSN’s Building B on the West Charleston campus during the first week of March. “He was walking in circles. He would play with his fingers. I immediately called my supervisor. I didn’t know who he was.”

“He was there five straight days,” Nina said. “He would sit and look directly through the (office) window. I started putting paper on the right side to keep him out of view, but he would get up and move and maybe see half of my shoulder. That’s how creepy he was.”

Authorities said McDonald, 30, confessed to Metropolitan Police Department detectives to killing his grandmother, Dina Vail, 80, Vail’s boyfriend, Andrew Graden, 43, and Christopher Brassard, 45, and injuring a third man at the west Las Vegas apartment he shared with Vail and Graden.

McDonald lived in the trio’s apartment, at 9105 W. Flamingo Road, for some days after Vail and Graden had died, according to a police report.

All three victims died from sharp force injuries, the coroner’s office reported.

About 9 a.m. Tuesday, Brassard and the other man, both apartment maintenance employees, arrived to perform a welfare check when Brassard was attacked and killed and the other man injured before he fled the unit, based on the report.

Police, who arrested McDonald outside the apartment, located a bloody knife at the scene and reported that a sledgehammer-like blunt weapon or mace was also used in the homicides.

Nina, confirmed by her full name as an employee of CSN on the college’s website, said that she used FaceTime to send a picture to her supervisor of McDonald while he was in the lobby.

‘It looks just like him’

“I recognized him when I saw him on the news,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh my God.’ I sent a picture to my supervisor and she said, ‘It looks just like him.’ I was scared to leave my office.”

She said McDonald sat there and stared at her for hours from Monday to Friday that week in March, and she called University Police Services about him. He left when the campus police questioned him, but he returned to the lobby later, she said.

Campus officers told her they did not make a report of the incident after finding out that the person was a CSN student and that short of him actually harming her, they had no legal basis for removing him.

Nina’s supervisor, who declined to be named in this story but was confirmed as a CSN employee on the website, revealed that McDonald was a student at CSN’s West Charleston campus in the spring semester and is currently enrolled in summer session.

His summer classes are History 100 and Philosophy 102, and he is signed up in the fall to take three art classes and ones in dance, communications and marketing, for a total of 16 units, the supervisor said.

The supervisor recalled when Nina complained about McDonald hanging out in the lobby and sent her the photo.

“He was sitting in that area and would stare at her for long hours, just staring at her,” the supervisor said.

His behavior was “walking in circles, playing with his hands, twiddling his thumbs,” the supervisor said.

Campus police responded by saying that “it’s not a crime to stare at you, and unless he is physically harassing or attacking you, there is nothing we can do about it,” the supervisor said.

Both employees said that McDonald’s extended presence there was an example of ongoing problems with people, specifically the homeless, using the lobby outside the English Department in Building B to lounge inside for long periods with little or no security presence.

A spokesperson for University Police Services, based at UNLV, could not be reached for comment.

Naomi Haskell, a woman identified as the mother of “Spencer” in a 2013 article in The Washington Post about a 19-year-old teen with a form of schizophrenia known as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar subtype, was reached on a mobile phone with an area code for Houston.

“I don’t know any more than you guys know,” Haskell said after being asked about her son and the homicides. “I can’t talk to you guys right now.”

Graden’s mother, Brenda Graden, 69, contacted by phone in Washington state, said her son, nicknamed AJ, met Dina Vail in Las Vegas eight or nine years ago after Vail asked him to dance at a nightclub.

Her son and Vail never formally married but once went to Costa Rica and exchanged vows and rings, she said.

‘Very kind, very loving’

She never met Vail or anyone in Vail’s family, she said.

“He was very kind, very loving, very generous,” she said. “I don’t know that my son had any enemies. He was a very happy- go-lucky type of person. He was somebody who wouldn’t turn his back on somebody in need.”

Andrew Graden has a son living in Washington with Asberger’s syndrome, a form of autism, she said. She had another child, a daughter, who died about 20 years ago, she said.

Her son earned a good living during weekslong stays at clinics for medical trials, lending his body for examination while testing new drug treatments, she said.

He loved to shoot pool, took part in tournaments and considered becoming a professional, but decided against it and had the pool table in his and Vail’s apartment sold and removed recently in favor of a “minimalist” décor with no furniture in the living room, she said.

The last time they spoke was by phone the Friday before the slayings, talking about his new interest in investing his money, she said.

Andrew Graden and Vail “were trying to help (McDonald) because he was homeless,” Brenda Graden said.

“The kid, he’s schizophrenic,” she said. “His grandmother and our AJ took him in.”

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.