As an elderly man stepped from his car Tuesday evening at a restaurant near downtown Las Vegas, three young men quickly approached him, grabbed his keys, knocked him to the ground and beat him.
On Wednesday night, hours after Metro Police publicized footage of the attack, investigators obtained tips from the public and made several arrests.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were in custody, but about 24 hours earlier, the trio of suspects who stole the 78-year-old retiree’s car and cellphone showed “no remorse, no care and no value for life whatsoever,” Metro Police Capt. Laz Chavez said Wednesday morning. “They’re savages.”
A surveillance camera at the restaurant in the 500 block of East Fremont Street, near Charleston Boulevard, captured the 5 p.m. attack. At one point, when the car wouldn’t start, one of the men beat the victim some more, Chavez said.
“He was beaten pretty severely,” suffering significant injuries to his eyes and face, Chavez said. The man remained in the hospital Wednesday morning.
Metro had hoped the video would help identify the suspects: three men in their late teens or early 20s, Chavez said.
“This man provided no resistance and yet the suspects savagely beat him, took his car keys, took his cellphone and even after they retrieved all that, they went back and beat him some more,” Chavez said.
Witnesses told investigators they had seen the perpetrators in the area, and the men have been identified as suspects in other crimes, Chavez said.
“If they’re watching TV, we will find you, so it’s time for you to turn yourselves in now and give this poor man his keys, his car, his phone and give him back his dignity and his life that (you) took away from him last night,” Chavez said, directly addressing the suspects.
The longer they went unidentified, the more likely they were to strike again, Chavez said. “If we don’t catch these men now, they can absolutely do this again to somebody else,” he said.
The stolen car, a 2001 Ford Taurus, was located today in the area of Charleston Boulevard and Fort Apache Road, police said.
Anyone with information is asked to call police at 702-828-4348, or to remain anonymous, contact Crime Stoppers at 702-385-5555 or online at crimestoppersofnv.com.