Las Vegas man gets life for killing ex-wife in front of child

Calling the murder of a woman in front of a her 6-year-old daughter “as brutal as they come,” a Las Vegas judge on Friday sentenced Andre James King to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Before being sentenced, the now 35-year-old King said his his ex-wife, Sabrina Dena McMillon, told him he could never see their child again and slammed a door in his face.

Then King, who pleaded guilty in February to murder, home invasion, robbery and burglary in order to avoid the death penalty, went on to describe how he dismembered 37-year-old McMillon’s body after killing her.

McMillon had filed a restraining order against King, and he went to her northwest valley home in the 8200 block of Hollister Avenue to confront her about it, but she wouldn’t let him inside.

“I go into a helluva rage,” King, who also goes by Andre Hardiman, said of the April 2008 slaying. “And I lost it. I lost it. I kicked in the door, and I strangled her.”

McMillon initially tried to run away, but fell and started to bleed, before King choked her on the living room floor as their daughter stood just a few steps away, according to the girl’s grand jury testimony.

“I didn’t understand anything until I noticed my daughter’s feet in front of me,”King told District Judge David Barker on Friday. “The first thing that comes to my mind is that I have to tie her shoes before she falls and hurts herself.”

He said the girl looked “frightened and scared.”

He pulled McMillon’s lifeless body into another room, and asked his daughter to grab her brown blanket so he could cover her mother.

“I got to get (the girl) somewhere where she doesn’t see this anymore,” King said, so he took her to school.

On the drive, he told his daughter not to tell any of her friends what she saw or he would spank her, the girl said.

King went back to the house and tried to stage a robbery, throwing clothes and jewelry about the bedroom, and stealing a television and computers.

King then dragged McMillon’s body into her gray 2005 Nissan Armada and drove to a southwest valley construction site at the intersection of Pebble Road and Riley Street, where he slashed her face with an ax, cut off her hands and set fire to her body.

“The only reason to have done that damage to her, damage to that body and desecrate it, was because of his violence and his hatred and his anger at Sabrina,” prosecutor Pamela Weckerly said.

King said he “disliked her for the things she did to me, but I could never hate her. She was the mother of my child.”

He apologized to McMillon’s family members, who wept in the back row of the courtroom gallery.

Asking the judge for leniency, King’s defense attorneys said he was raised in abject poverty by a single mother who toiled in prostitution and was regularly abused.

“I never had a father,” King said and referred to his own child. “I wanted to stay in her life.”

In delivering the sentence, Barker said he was “shocked by the level of violence” in a murder that was “as brutal as they come… doing it in front of your 6-year-old daughter.”

Police discovered McMillon’s SUV, with specialized license plates, in the Sante Fe Station parking lot, on the opposite end of the valley from where King dumped her body. Outside a home where King stayed, they found the ax alongside a plastic bag that contained McMillon’s hands.

King denied the killing when detectives first questioned him. And for a moment, they left him alone in the interrogation room.

He had ditched his bloody clothes, but realized he still had her key fob in his pocket, so he dropped it in the trash can.

Contact reporter David Ferrara at 702-380-1039 or dferrara@reviewjournal.com. Find him on Twitter: @randompoker.