Wife of Wynn guard remembers former Marine, aspiring nurse

The wife of a Wynn Las Vegas employee killed this week by a co-worker said the couple were days away from moving into their first house together, in Henderson.

Marjorie Almonte, 36, and husband Yoseph Almonte, 31, had bought their first dining room set last weekend. It was all wood and included a bench Yoseph Almonte looked forward to using for homework; he was going to school to be an emergency medical technician.

“It’s so surreal,” Marjorie Almonte said Friday night. “I’m moving on with our lives, with our plans, but he’s not around. His bed is empty.”

Yoseph Almonte, a special operations guard at the Wynn, was shot and killed in a murder-suicide Tuesday in the employee parking garage after he went to check on Reggie Tagget, a co-worker who had been missing for four days before he parked in the garage that evening, according to Las Vegas police and the Clark County coroner’s office.

Almonte approached Tagget’s car and was shot multiple times before Tagget, 42, walked away from the car and fatally shot himself.

When Wynn security reviewed his badge Tuesday, they found he had entered the garage around 4:40 p.m., police told Marjorie Almonte.

When Yoseph Almonte went to the garage with several other Wynn guards, Marjorie Almonte said, her husband was the only one armed, so he approached the car and had a brief dialogue with Tagget.

She said police have since told her that Tagget was sitting in the garage for more than an hour waiting for his ex-wife to walk to her car.

When Almonte tried to help Tagget get out of the car, he was met with eight shots to the torso, Marjorie Almonte was told by detectives. Her husband fired one shot, striking Tagget in the back while he ran from the car.

“He went down with a fight,” Almonte said of her husband. “I’m so proud of him. … He knew there were other officers with him. He was protecting his workers.”

Marjorie Almonte said that since her husband started at the Wynn more than three years ago, the guards have been asking for bulletproof vests, but management told them it would look too intimidating for guests.

In a statement after Tuesday’s shooting, a Wynn spokesman said the resort will be supplying ballistic body armor for armed guards after requests from the security team.

“If my husband had a vest, he would have had a chance to at least go to the hospital, because if you get hit maybe you have internal bleeding or bruising,” Almonte said. “The impact can be bad, but he would have had a chance, the chance he deserved, and he never got that chance.”

Plans for a baby, a new city

After being honorably discharged from the Marines in 2017, Yoseph Almonte briefly returned to his home in New York City before moving to Las Vegas for a job at the Wynn. It was supposed to be temporary; his goal was to become a nurse after he finished EMT school. As Almonte neared four years in Las Vegas, he was most proud of his purple belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu and the plans he and his wife had to get pregnant by the end of the year.

“Maybe because of the Marines, they have to have a structure and something to look for. He was an A-type,” she said.

The couple had a quiet downtown wedding in July, but Almonte promised his wife that they would have the big wedding she wanted, ideally when they moved to Denver someday. In the meantime, they stayed home each night watching “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” and “The Crown” to save money.

“He was my best friend; we did everything together. In two years we never fought. I cannot explain — he was the perfect person,” Almonte said. “The chapter was cut so short, so soon. My husband should be here right now.”

Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.