A Crime in Boulder City

Friday dawned warm and windless. A dilapidated white car emerged from the Valley below, speeding peerless along US Highway 95 through the crevice in the Black Mountains, with its windows wide open and its music untamed. Then it stopped, just short of Boulder City, in the parking lot of the Railroad Pass Hotel and Casino.

The journalist, a man intrigued, above all by people and the distinct towns in which they live, who by mere fortune found an occupation for his lifelong and insatiable curiosities, stepped out of the car. A sterile silence hovered. But then fleeting northbound cars leveled it, one by one, as they whizzed down the mountain. The air, dry and still somewhat igneous over the years, chapped his lips.

He had heard murmurs in the Valley about a dramatic event that had recently taken place in Boulder City, a town close in geography and kin in climate to his hometown of Las Vegas, but quite distant from its neighbor in every other aspect. Yet, he could not find out anything. The Las Vegas newspapers stated nothing about it, nor did the radio, and the local television news broadcasts were just as disappointing. All of which he considered odd, because from what he had heard, it was an incident of newsworthy magnitude and effect in that small city.

This type of reticence is typical, he was told. People familiar with the region told him that Boulder City is a taciturn town, not just proud but vehement about the reputation for placidity it had built for itself over the past 75 years, wishing not only to lure tourists and potential residents but also to set itself apart from its neighbor just north, that wild and effulgent city of Las Vegas. The authorities, the businesses, the citizens—all of Boulder City, it was said, would like nothing more than to keep that image intact.

So that all the journalist heard down below were faint whispers. Sunday night there were police everywhere. Not just BC police. Henderson police and Metro S.W.A.T. were there, too. They blocked off the streets. Avenue A. Avenue B. New Mexico Street. Folks couldn't get to their houses. Folks were evacuated. A standoff. Perhaps even hostages. He resolved to learn the story of what happened that Sunday night—May 28—in Boulder City, and so he hopped in his problematic car the following Friday and made the 20-mile drive to obtain it firsthand. First, he walked into the Railroad Pass. The midmorning Southern Nevada sun had already begun to establish its tyrannical reign over that second day of June, and he was thirsty.

"Hey, brother, what happened in Boulder City?" he said to the bartender, well onto his second drink.

Right away, and without equivocation, the bartender knew what he was speaking of, because not much happens in Boulder City. "I don't know, man," he said. "I just live here."

Nor did anyone else in the Railroad Pass say anything. The journalist thus left the casino, was struck defenseless by the oppressive heat, and returned to his car. Boulder City was only a few minutes away. He continued south. Into the high desert winds.

He had called the police—the chief, the sergeants—a couple of days before. No one answered. On Friday morning he tried once more. But, again, no one answered. Nor did anyone return his messages. He would later learn that the public information officer doesn't work on Fridays, and the Boulder City Police Department is too small for any law enforcement officials not to be out in the field. And so the journalist went straight to the police station.

It shares the same edifice as the Boulder City Senior Center. Which is directly across from City Hall, and which marks the end of the downtown strip. In essence, it is just like all else in that quaint and intimate town: within walking distance of everything. The dispatcher, sitting behind a bulletproof glass, surfaced her head from a sea of papers and said: "Yeah, I know what you're talking about, but there's nothin' I can tell you. We don't even have the release written up for that yet."

The journalist persisted: "Is there anyone I can speak with about it—the chief? an officer? anyone?—because as of right now I in reality don't know anything."

"They're in meetings," the dispatcher said, impatient and annoyed.

"How about if I come back in a couple hours—after lunch—will they then be available?"

The dispatcher shrugged her shoulders. Like a lot of Boulder City, she was old enough to either soon retire or spend her retirement working. "Call public information on Monday," she said, submerging her head back into her papers and thus concluding the unforeseen and unwelcome appointment.

Therefore the journalist went scavenging for the elusive story downtown, where Boulder City comes together. It is a single strip of road—the Nevada Highway—lined with small businesses whose owners, like most people in pinpoint towns, are multifaceted, and in the soporific midday heat it seemed like the street was floating on water. From each side, men and women, their youths left in Las Vegas, carry on conversations over the street, where cars pass along with courtesy and without music. Like falling mist a general friendliness and authentic hospitality help assuage the heat.

Yet the waitress at the Coffee Cup, after serving the journalist his breakfast burrito with motherly diligence, became irritable when asked what had happened in Boulder City last Sunday.

"I don't know what happened; I don't know," she said, at once losing her saccharine smile and walking away. "But that doesn't mean nothing happened. I just don't know about it."

The journalist was unflagging: "Well, then, would you mind asking around—your coworkers and regulars and all?"

She didn't say another word to him. Not even when it was time to pay the bill.

Because he had done his research, he had known that in 2004 there had been some 16,000 people living in Boulder City, and only 13 violent crimes (murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults), giving the town an admirable stat: a mere .008 violent crimes per 100,000 people—a modicum of the national average, 465, and of Las Vegas' 789. But he had never realized just how tranquil and without conflict the city was. Not until Friday, when halfway through his observations he stopped in Milo's Best Cellars, one of Southern Nevada's true gems with its splendid wine selection and stellar menu, and a waitress there named Christina summed the pacific town up like this: "It's the reason that, when I had my baby, I left Las Vegas."

The reporter, of course, said to her: "Tell me one thing, good-lookin', what happened here last Sun—"

"Okay that kind of stuff never happens here," she blurted, each word tripping over the one before it. "That was a weird, crazy exception."

The only problem was, not even she was sure what had happened. Thus the journalist continued through downtown, which, according to what one local said (while taking relief from the intolerable afternoon heat in a chair under the terrace of a gift shop, and weaving in and out of his siesta), is stuck somewhere between the 1940s and '50s. The journalist's head soon bore a crown of sweat, and he could feel the odor accumulating underneath his buttoned shirt. He had surrendered himself to this overheated state several times since he moved to Las Vegas, but on the streets of Boulder City, he felt dirty.

His first drink at the Back Stop—a bar with a façade that reads "A free drink to anyone any day the sun doesn't shine in Boulder City," and that stands just a stone's throw away from where the hermetic incident had taken place—cooled his internal radiator. And by the time he was finished with his second, half the bar at 2 in the afternoon was recounting the story of what had happened in Boulder City Sunday night to him, piecemeal, and, as with many stories told in that town, it based by and large on hearsay.

"Man, that was excitin'!" said one man, a dispatcher for the Lake Mead park services, his Tennessee tongue in full force. "Boy, I'll tell ya: It was like real-life TV."

Nikki, the bartender, an older woman who has been biking her way to work since she moved to Boulder City in 1989, said:

"They were evacuating people from the apartments, talking through the megaphone, people were out on the sidewalks lookin' on, wonderin' what was goin' on. Then everyone heard a loud boom. I'm sure that stuff happens all the time in Las Vegas, but we're like the antithesis to Las Vegas here. We're just small potatoes. It was really somethin' for us."

A patron of the bar, who claims that he pays the same $125-per-month rent today as he did 25 years ago, when he moved into his unchanged apartment, said that it was teenagers who caused all the ruckus, and he had proof. And sure enough, he did. The old man retrieved a copy of the Boulder City News, which was fresh off the press, and on its front page the story of Sunday night appeared.

It had all started just before 6 p.m. An 18-year-old man from Boulder City engaged in a fight with another young man, and, reportedly, brandished a gun. The police were summoned to the scene, but the 18-year-old, Henry Latstetter Jr., had already fled. They traced him back to his mother's home, in the Cherry Lynn apartment complex, where he barricaded himself with two other teenagers. The BC police called in Metro's S.W.A.T. team, and a standoff stretched well into the night. It wasn't until about 10 p.m., when S.W.A.T. employed a distractive technique called flash bangs, that the young men emerged from the apartment, with their hands up. The night came to an end with no one hurt, one of the young men posting bail, the other two locked up in the Henderson Detention Center (for Boulder City does not have an active jail), and the rest of town electrified with excitement and an urge to gossip.

The sun was still high and despotic in the 5 o'clock sky when the journalist emerged from the front doors of the Back Stop, had his own standoff with his resistant white car, and then returned to the Valley to write down everything he had heard in one maniacal stroke.

Three days later he got in touch with the police, who by then could add nothing to the story of what had happened in Boulder City on Sunday night.