The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS- A wounded police officer was home from a hospital on Thursday, while investigators pieced together what led to a furious shootout that killed a patrol sergeant and a gunman at a southwest Las Vegas home.
Sgt. Henry Prendes, 37, a 14-year police veteran, died in the Wednesday afternoon gunbattle.
The department released a 911 audiotape of a woman making several frantic calls describing Amir Rashid Crump, 21, beating her, breaking items in the house and smashing windows on her vehicle parked outside.
“Come quick!” the woman says near the end of the 11-minute tape, during which she spelled Crump’s name for the dispatcher. “He’s got a gun!”
Crump opened fire as Prendes approached a door of the house, police said, then pinned down officers and peppered the neighborhood and police cruisers with shots from an assault rifle.
The other officer, 35, an eight-year department veteran assigned to the gang detail, suffered a leg wound while trying to rescue Prendes, the department said. He had been driving to work when he heard a call for assistance. He was released from University Medical Center late Wednesday.
The wounded officer was not immediately identified under a department policy that withholds the name of officers involved in shootings for 48 hours.
“This could have been a lot worse,” Clark County Sheriff Bill Young, chief of the Las Vegas police department, said several hours after the shooting. “We are extremely fortunate that other police officers were not killed in this incident.”
At least 50 shots were fired from various vantage points inside the house, and Crump paused to reload several times, Young said. At least five officers returned fire for several minutes before Crump was shot outside the front door.
“He was prepared for this,” Young said of Crump, an aspiring rap musician who grew up in Las Vegas and went by the nickname “Trajik.”
“He was ready, waiting and willing to kill a police officer,” Young said.
Prendes, a married father of two daughters, became the first Las Vegas police officer slain by gunfire in the line of duty since 1988. The department began Thursday to raise funds to benefit Prendes’ family.
A memorial was planned Tuesday morning at a church in Henderson.