NLV police: 16-year-old ‘still a suspect’ in drug shooting

Gummy worms and cellphone data could soon decide the fate of Patrick Harper.

The Clark County district attorney’s office dropped murder charges against the 16-year-old Mojave High School student Tuesday, but Thursday officials from the North Las Vegas Police Department — the agency that arrested Harper earlier this month — clarified that Harper is still being investigated in the slaying of a 20-year-old woman in a botched drug deal earlier this month.

Andrea Lafon was shot in the head on Sept. 5 after a marijuana deal went sour, according to witnesses.

Police also disputed that convenience store footage released Tuesday by Harper’s lawyer flatly cleared him.

“He’s still a suspect,” police spokeswoman Chrissie Coon said, while adding that police aren’t excluding other possible suspects.

Questions about the timeline of the killing have plagued the police investigation since Harper’s lawyer revealed a convenience store video showing Harper buy gummy worms from an AMPM convenience store on Ann Road at 7:11 p.m.

Coon said police received their first call about the shooting at Small Mountain Avenue and Guinyard Street at 7:18 p.m., creating a tight window for police to prove their version of events. The store is 1.5 miles away from the shooting, and there is no evidence that Harper or anyone with him had access to a car.

And between the store visit and the shooting, police said Harper had a conversation in an apartment complex near the shooting site with a witness who asked Harper for gummy worms, Coon said. That witness identified Harper and offered the story to police about the candy, proving that he was in the area just before the shooting, she said.

Police never bothered to obtain the video until after a private investigator working for Harper’s lawyer requested it from the store. Harper has maintained he was at a Mojave High football game when the shooting happened.

The DA’s office dropped the case because of the time discrepancy, saying that Harper couldn’t have been in two places at once.

Harper had been in jail since Sept. 11 until his release Tuesday. The case against him relied strongly on two witnesses that said Harper was the shooter, but that evidence has also come under scrutiny.

One of the witnesses who implicated Harper has recanted in the media, accusing Detective Jesus Prieto of turning off the recorder and threatening him with prison to coerce his statement. On Thursday, police played the 21-minute recording of the witness’ statement, showing that Prieto did not bully the witness into implicating Harper. There were no breaks in the audio stream.

Police did not publicly release the tape, nor provide a transcript. They did not allow phones or recording devices in the room during the discussion.

All the questions about the time issues could be solved in a few weeks.

Coon said detectives received the cellphone data for Harper’s phone Thursday and expect to soon receive data from Lafon’s phone, as well as from the phones of other witnesses at the scene. Harper’s phone had been wiped clean by the time police received it, Coon said, but it’s unclear when police obtained it.

The cell data should reveal who arranged the drug deal with Lafon and where the suspects were at the time of the shooting, Coon said.

Harper’s lawyer, Kristina Wildeveld, was not available for an extensive interview Thursday, but she disputed the police version of the events in a text message to a reporter. She said the first call to 911 was at 7:15 p.m. and that Harper left the store at 7:14 p.m., not 7:11 p.m.

Wildeveld said she offered to have Harper take a polygraph exam for police, but they declined.

Reporters Francis McCabe and Ricardo Torres contributed to this report. Contact reporter Mike Blasky at 702-383-0283mblasky@reviewjournal.com. Follow @blasky on Twitter.