I was sitting there and became aware of a disturbance, kind of to my left and behind me. And I saw a gentleman walking forward to my left, walking toward where cars were coming out and being dried off. And I heard another gentleman yelling at him, and he was following the first man, and he was very agitated and he went up to him.
“The man who is heading to where they dry the cars was a thin man, gray, with a very thin mustache—a gray mustache. The man who was yelling at the first man was younger, larger. He says to the first man:
“‘Look out for who you call a bitch.’”
So says Robert Alan Mirisch. He was sitting on one of the benches in the shaded patio where folks sit to wait and watch cars pull into the Jiffy Lube shop or the smog tent or the full-service gas station while waiting for their cars to be cleansed at Fabulous Freddy’s Car Wash. There on the southwest block of Fort Apache Road and West Charleston Boulevard.
Yes. He was sitting there watching it all, and it was March, and on that day there was neither rain nor wind, and the sun hung over the Las Vegas Valley high and clear but not unmerciful as it does during the summer months. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, by all accounts, it was pleasant. Tank-top weather.
And as ever on Friday afternoons, business was steady, and Parley Call Jr. was too busy in his smog tent running an emissions test on a customer’s car to have seen anything. And, at any rate, he is not the type of man who pokes his head into other people’s business. So when he heard the ruckus coming from the front of the convenience store some 30 yards away he did not look, but kept his head in his work, the smog test.
Next time pick on somebody your own size, the younger man shouted at the older.
Behind the counter inside the convenience store Jennifer Gardas could not decipher the words due to the glass window that separated her from the propane tanks and the two men in a heated but unintelligible exchange before it.
Ben Skelton, however, could. He was sitting right there, under the patio and adjacent to the cage encapsulating the propane tanks along the convenience store’s façade, at his stool where he greets the many customers who come to Fabulous Freddy’s and assists them with anything under his province at that multiservice open-air center.
He was sitting right next to the two men, the older and the younger.
They were now just a hairsbreadth from each other, and people except Call turned to look because of the 10 to 15 seconds of tumult with which they commanded attention to themselves and the tension with which they filled the entire block. The sun was still a couple of hours yet from retiring behind the Red Rock mountains, and so nothing was hidden. And then the push.
From the chest of the younger man to the body of the older.
A push like a single stroke of lightning with its pursuant thunderclap sound when moments later the older man’s head crashed against the propane tank cage, about waist-high. “Well, I didn’t feel it,” says Robert Mirisch, “but from the impression, it was a hard push: The older man was propelled, thrown off-balance, and as he fell he hit his head on the top part of the cage, then fell forward and hit the concrete.” Now the body of the older man, which had in actuality been lifted off the ground, was flaccid, and his face was bloody, and the blood leaked red and effusive, leaked out of his nose and mouth and leaked toward an unnatural death. Jennifer Gardas called for help at 3:51 p.m., and the paramedics arrived less than five minutes later. The old man, mute and unmoving on the cement and surrounded by people stupefied and impotent, lay there on the ground face-painted with his own blood and, as it turned out, unsalvageable, on that otherwise splendid day of March 11, 2005.
Don’t f--k with me, the younger man said.
He straddled the older man and loomed over him.
I’ll f--k you up, he said.
Parley Call Jr. finally looked over, and he saw the crowd amassing around the man lying bloody on the ground. He joined them. People then began to motion toward the younger man, and when Call looked up he saw him at the gas pumps. Not fleeing.
The younger man was standing next to a black BMW SUV on which Call had run an emissions test no more than 20 minutes prior.
The older man died two days later at UMC of what the coroner would call head trauma from multiple skull fractures and brain contusions. He was 60 years old. At the preliminary hearing for the young man, charged with, at once, second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, the district attorney would ask Robert Mirisch about the cataclysmic events of that day.
He said: “The man who hit the propane cage and fell to the ground, the man who was injured—had he done anything in your presence to provoke the pushing?”
Mirisch, on the stand, responded: “Nothing that I saw.”
True. But what Mirisch had not seen was the road rage which led to an altercation between the older man and a woman much smaller and younger than he. Which led to a phone call from the woman to her husband. Which led to something instinctive and urgent, and perhaps even irrevocable, taking over the younger man. Which led to the brief but tempestuous altercation between him and the older man. Which led to the death of the older man on March 13 and the arrest of the younger man four days later, and then to this preliminary hearing on July 12, 2005.
Which is the reason the younger man’s lawyer, Pete S. Christiansen, argued before Las Vegas Justice of the Peace William Jansen that this was not a murder case.
That there was no doubt his client had in fact pushed the older man to his death, for not only had people seen it but his client’s own remorse and anguish had made it doubtless. But my client is not a murderer, Christiansen said. I’ve known him my whole life.
The younger man was 36 years old, and his name was Steve Shaw—Dr. Stephen Burnet Shaw—and he was by no means a reprobate but quite the contrary. He was a native of Las Vegas without a record and with the well-preserved reputation as a just man who adored his family and worked hard and went about things the right way. His dad was a developer and had named a street after his boy Stephen Burnet in Las Vegas, and here Steve had enjoyed a stellar career as a football player both in high school and at UNLV. He then turned himself into a chiropractor of solid repute, and he had served the Las Vegas Valley as such since 1997. With no official complaints against his license, and with enough success to have provided his wife and two little girls a comfortable living in Summerlin.
No, his attorney said. He is not a murderer.
He does not have a harmful bone in his body.
According to police reports, he was 6-foot-2, 195 pounds. The man he was accused of killing was 5’9” and 150.
Several witnesses testified to the thread of events that led to the push, and they testified to the push as well. Mirisch said that Shaw pushed the older man in the back, as the older man was attempting to walk away from the confrontation. Ben Skelton and gas attendant Joseph Martorello both said it was a push to the chest.
And Jennifer Gardas said, from her vantage point, it looked like it came from an angle, to the older man’s shoulder.
Shaw did not take the stand.
In any event the judge said there was substantial evidence that the irreversible deed had been done and now it was a question of malice.
“Malice can be determined by the totality of the circumstances,” Judge Jansen says. “It was a most unfortunate incident that took place, and I know [Shaw] has a good background. But it was an incident that happened.”
While speaking to Metro detectives in the wake of those calamitous events, Shaw said, I did what I did for my family.
The detective later said he believed Shaw to be genuine and earnest.
That was the reason that District Attorney David Roger, when announcing on March 22 that his office would indeed pursue the charges against Shaw, delivered a single statement that epitomized the entire ordeal:
“It’s a pretty sad case all around.”
Because the circumstances that life, in its inscrutable ways, threw at Steve Shaw on that day turned morality into parallax. Where from one viewpoint his actions could be empathized with, if not commended, and yet from another, abominated. Which led to an overwhelming question, and that is:
What would you have done in his shoes?
On July 12, 2005, Jansen ruled that the matter of malice was to be resolved by a jury, not by a single judge.
And so he let both counts remain and sent the unfortunate case of Steve Shaw to district court.
Steve Shaw’s wife is named Raquel, and before they had two little girls and a life together they fell hard for each other while Steve was in college. On the afternoon of March 11, 2005, Raquel’s tears had an alarming effect on her husband when she called in such an hysteria that the patient Dr. Shaw was with in his office could hear the crying.
She was crying, and she said that a man had invaded her car and had yelled at her and called her a bitch and a whore, and now Shaw could hear his children in the background crying, too. That’s what came to him by way of cellular phone, and that’s all he knew.
Parley Call Jr. said Raquel Shaw was lucid enough to pay the $29 for the emissions test he had just performed on her black BMW SUV. But that she was so absorbed by her hysteria that he had to ask her to move her car when another customer pulled up.
She had been jarred. She drove a few yards over to the gas pumps, where she had originally planned to go after her smog, according to Call. She went to pump No. 4, the farthest from the place where they dry the washed cars. She turned off her vehicle.
Attendant Joseph Martorello, 17, approached her SUV. “‘Anything I can do for you today?’” Martorello says he asked her. “She said, ‘Not right now.’ She stayed on the phone, and left the door open. She just left the door open.”
People all about. Here and there. Ebb and flow. The incipient warmth of spring. Martorello says:
“She asked me if I’d seen the gentleman yelling at her, and I said, ‘Yes.’ Then she says, ‘Can you go inside and see if he’s still there?’ I said, ‘Okay.’”
Martorello ran inside the convenience store and indeed saw the older gentleman. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt tucked in. “A medium-sized guy.” Martorello ran back.
“I told her, ‘Yes, he’s still there,’” Martorello says.
Raquel Shaw sat in the black BMW SUV with her two kids in the back. She didn’t buy any gas. She just waited.
Minutes passed.
Shaw had left his job and didn’t even need to inform his patient because his patient could hear the hysteria in the phone call and could see the distress in his longtime chiropractor’s reaction and so even offered his assistance. He told Shaw, I will go with you.
Shaw took off his physician’s shirt and hopped in his black Mercedes along with his longtime patient. He stayed on the phone. Raquel Shaw never stopped crying. She said she was at the Fabulous Freddy’s Car Wash and the man who had accosted her was still there.
Steve Shaw left his office on Rainbow Boulevard just south of Sahara Avenue. He flew up Sahara, and his heart rattled in its cage, and he was afraid. He was scared because he didn’t know. He was scared that his wife and two little girls were mere moments and inches away from harm. He was scared that the man could be large or armed or just plain nuts. He was scared that he might do something to protect his family and the cops would arrest him nonetheless and the American legal system would incarcerate him away from his wife and kids. And above all he was scared of what he would forevermore be in the eyes of his family, whom he was supposed to protect, if he did not come at all, if he did not do anything. The shame, the dishonor.
He did not think but felt. And the streetlights would not turn green fast enough.
At the intersection of Fort Apache and West Charleston he was stuck in a left-hand turn lane waiting to turn onto southbound Fort Apache and enter the carwash when the interminable red light was all he saw, and so he asked his patient to take over the steering wheel so that he could jump out and see about his family.
Then he arrived. Shaw protruded in a tank top from the bushes that demarcate Fabulous Freddy’s, and Call saw him walk past his smog station into the middle of the parking lot. That is the pivot point to all the various stations and services and stores which compose that busy block in Summerlin. Call says: “I knew exactly who he was, just by the way he was looking. He walked like he had a purpose for being there.”
Shaw’s patient pulled in the parking lot in Shaw’s black Mercedes and got out.
Martorello had been running back and forth between the gas pumps and the convenience store, filling up the gas tanks of cars and making change for their grateful drivers, and he saw the older man outside the front of the convenience store now. The older man had, Martorello says, just spoken to customer representative Ben Skelton, whose stool sits under the patio just outside the convenience store in between the sliding front doors and the cage that encapsulates the propane tanks. Right next to where Robert Alan Mirisch was sitting, waiting for his car to be washed and dried.
“I was actually in the midst of them,” Martorello says. “I ran to pay for somebody’s gas. When I ran back out, I saw Mr. Shaw tap the older man on the shoulder. It was a calm tap. He said, ‘Can I talk to you for a second?’”
The district attorneys trying the case of Steve Shaw say they never claimed there was any intent on the defendant’s part to kill. Only that there was evidence of malice. Of having killed, without intent, during the commission of another crime that is inherently dangerous. Which in this case was battery. That, under the law, NRS 200.070, constitutes murder, they say.
Shaw pleaded not guilty in district court in the summer of 2005. Then his lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, stating that no normal person, unless he was on a cliff or next to an electric fence with a danger sign, would think that pushing someone naturally tends to destroy human life. In November 2005, District Judge Donald Mosley determined there was insubstantial evidence to charge Shaw with murder, and so the charge was dropped.
All that was left was the involuntary manslaughter charge, which carried with it a potential prison sentence of four years and a fine of $5,000. Time passed. Motions were filed. Complaints amended. Anguish felt. By everyone.
Shaw thought about what he had done. He cried. He didn’t know the man he pushed, and when Shaw had called about the man’s health following the incident, the worry in his voice was overt, and the person who delivered to him the tragic news of the man’s death had to begin with the preamble, You might want to sit down before I tell you this.
Shaw believes today what he believed then, which is that he was there at Fabulous Freddy’s to protect his family. That all he knew was his wife of 11 years crying terrified on the phone and his kids crying in the background and that his duty was to protect, and that’s why he approached the man irrespective of age or build because he was still a man and said,
Why are you yelling at my wife?
Why are you yelling at my kids?
Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?
In retrospect there were alternative courses of action. Yes. But he was scared, too, and what would have been the punishment for doing something as ignoble as not showing up at all? Or something as pusillanimous as not confronting the man who invaded his wife’s car and scared her and his daughters to tears? Maybe something irredeemable. Like honor lost before his wife and children.
In the case of Stephen Shaw there was time and distance. He was 3.6 miles and 10 minutes away from the harm done to his wife and kids, and a reasonable jury far from that unenviable situation, and with time to deliberate, might say Shaw demonstrated inordinate, reproachable rage when he struck the smaller, older man. Cooler heads should have prevailed.
Or at least that’s what Shaw’s attorney feared. And so on March 26, 2007, Shaw took his advice and retracted his not guilty plea and replaced it with an Alford plea. Which in essence is not to admit guilt but to concede that a jury might deem the evidence against you worthy of a greater charge.
Alford pleas are oftentimes an advisable course of action when civil suits against the defendant loom in the foreseeable future.
Brent Percival, Shaw’s current attorney, says that, in the end, Shaw just wanted this prolonged thunderstorm to end. For everybody’s sake.
The sentencing phase was scheduled for June 3. Thus, heading into the summer of 2007, the only drama remaining in the criminal case against Stephen Shaw was left to the discretion of Judge Donald Mosley, whom some court insiders describe as an old-school kind of man. And who, according to public record, once dropped a man on his butt in the street for coming at him in an instance of road rage.
“She pulled in,” says Parley Call Jr., who owns the smog shop at Fabulous Freddy’s. “She said she needed to get gasoline and a smog test. I told her gasoline is done over there. I will do the test right now.
“I opened her door, scanned her VIN number. It wouldn’t work. I asked for her information with her registration so I can type in the VIN number, which is 17 numbers that we have to type in twice to make sure it’s correct.
“So I went up to the front, started typing in the VIN number, and I could hear behind me her having a conversation with somebody.
“I was facing my machine. I wasn’t looking back. After a few seconds, I realized they weren’t having a good discussion. They were having an argument.”
Joseph Martorello had watched a black BMW SUV pull into the smog area. He had watched Call open the door to scan the VIN number. He had seen the door left open.
“An older gentleman walked down,” he says. “I saw him walking down the lot to her door and proceed to just yell at her, call her names. Actually said she had cut him off.
“His back was to me. She was in the car. Basically she was leaning back like maybe he was going to do something to her because he was in her face pretty good inside the doorway.
“He was basically in her doorway just kind of yelling in her face, pointing at her, calling her names. Called her a bitch and a whore and that you cut me off.”
And Call, who had not taken his eyes off his machine: “I kind of remember her saying things like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and ‘Oh my God, I did not.’”
“Not arguing so much,” Martorello says of Raquel Shaw. “But, like, her own defense. As far as it wasn’t intentional to cut him off or anything like that, and she was in tears for a while because of some of the names he was saying, which was understandable.”
Later, after the sun set on that Friday, Martorello would give police a recorded statement. In which he said there were kids in the back seat and they were “freaking out.”
Call never looked back. “I typed in the VIN number. Probably takes 30 to 40 seconds. When I was done, I turned around to complete the test. He was already gone.”
According to standard procedure Call connected the computer in the black BMW SUV to the computer in his smog station, and then Raquel Shaw spoke to him. “She was kind of hysterical, just upset. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s all over. Just blow it off, it’s done.’ She said, ‘No, it isn’t, it’s not done.’ I says, ‘He’s gone.’ She said, ‘No, he is not, he’s over there getting a carwash.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
“Then she said, ‘Where is my husband when I need him?’”
There was nothing the doctor could do to cure the disquiet in his heart, and it showed. At the sentencing portion of his case in Judge Donald Mosley’s courtroom, he sobbed. More than two years had passed since the day he pushed and killed a man.
Shaw had been out on a $100,000 bail since March 24, 2005, the day he was charged and the day he turned himself in. He now sat at the defendant’s table facing the very real possibility of four years in prison.
The parole and probation department had investigated the matter and sent the judge a report recommending a jail sentence of 12 to 30 months.
In the courtroom there was silence and there were silent prayers and then Mosley ordered Stephen Burnet Shaw no jail time but a fixed term of five years probation.
Moreover, the judge ordered Shaw to attend an anger-management class.
The district attorney was incredulous. Probation and a class. No jail. No restitution. Just incredulous he was.
Had not a man been killed?
There was no doubt about it. His name was Lawrence Weiss. He was a husband and a father and a brother. And not only that: He was beloved.
His family is still lamenting. They say Larry and his wife, Sheryl, had just moved to Las Vegas, full-time, months before the events that ended his life. He had lived in Thousand Oaks, California, for 30 years prior to that.
They say the couple gave rise to three children of character, and Lawrence Weiss was very proud of them. His oldest daughter, Teresa Weiss, was in beautiful Italy on her honeymoon when the heart-stopping news came that her father had been attacked and was in critical care in the hospital in Las Vegas. She dropped everything and rushed to Las Vegas as fast as fate would permit. She wasn’t able to get here in time to see her father before he died, two days after the incident, on March 13, 2005.
None of them could reconcile the peaceable temperament of the man they knew and adored with the road rage and threatening behavior toward Raquel Shaw that was said to instigate this whole catastrophic ordeal. This irrecoverable loss. And even if Lawrence Weiss had done those things, he did not deserve to die on account of them, did he? Surely not in this day and country, wouldn’t you agree?
They all showed up at the sentencing, and many more did, too. The courtroom was overflowing, and half of the support was for Larry Weiss, a man who had retired in Las Vegas from his career as vice president of operations in the sales and marketing department of Warner/Elektra Records. Who had just days before his death returned to Las Vegas from visiting a physician in LA due to his chronic neck and back pains.
Weiss’ supporters wanted to see justice done. They wanted to see balance restored. A man who lived and gave and was loved died, and shouldn’t there be some kind of commensurable payment for that?
Sheryl Weiss is now without a husband and Teresa a father, and shouldn’t the wife and daughters of the man responsible for that void experience absence, too, at least for the minimum 12-month sentence an involuntary manslaughter charge carries?
While that would not bring back Larry Weiss nor bring total and absolute closure to his family and friends who loved him, it would bring about a sense of justice.
Justice has not yet been served, say Weiss’ loved ones.
By and large that is the reason Sheryl Weiss has pursued civil action against both the Shaw family and Fabulous Freddy’s. It was first filed against Raquel Shaw because Weiss’ lawyers say that through the arts of “feigning” and “theatrics” she instigated the whole fatal matter. (For, they say, how could she have been composed when paying Call if she were really that frightened? And if she were in fact scared, why didn’t she leave the scene?) Then, in succeeding months, they included Fabulous Freddy’s and Stephen Shaw for their respective roles. Because they want somebody to pay for Lawrence Weiss’ death.
Justice. Linda Edwards, the sister of Larry Weiss, filed a complaint against Shaw’s chiropractor license soon after the June 3 sentencing verdict. She says a man capable of doing what he did to her brother should not be entrusted with helping people recover from their pains. The Chiropractic Physicians Board of Nevada’s executive director says she would have done so anyway, due to “unprofessional conduct” on Shaw’s part, and that an investigator for the board is currently looking into the whole ordeal. The people, the places, the things that stirred up the ugly storm of March 11, 2005.
Shaw could face punishment ranging from public reprimand to complete license revocation, says the executive director.
Sheryl Weiss returned from California and her car was dirty. And so her husband went to get the car washed. He lived in Summerlin; Fabulous Freddy’s was six miles away. He went north on Town Center Drive and took a right on Charleston Boulevard, and it was a little after 3 o’clock.
Near the same time Raquel Shaw made a left onto Charleston. It was approaching time to renew the registration on her black BMW SUV. Shaw, a stay-at-home mom, was going down the street from the Summerlin home she shared with her husband, Stephen, and their two girls, 5 and 7, to Fabulous Freddy’s, to have the smog checked. The children were in the back seat.
It was Friday in March and the sun was soft overhead and this Valley can be brilliant at such times.
March 11, 2005. The two men had never known each other until their lives enmeshed for but a few minutes, and then it all went asunder, and now one man is dead and the other must live with it, and may the God who made both Stephen Shaw and Lawrence Weiss and things such as honor and justice and even us who despite ourselves try our best to see them done have pity on it all.
Pity on it all.
Joshua Longobardy is a Weekly staff writer.