Monday, March 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
A single bullet broke a record dry spell in North Las Vegas homicides.
North Las Vegas recorded its first murder in three months with the killing of 34-year-old Jeffery Charles Carbary on Interstate 15 north of Cheyenne Avenue Friday night.
At this time last year, North Las Vegas Police had already seen six homicides.
Linda Carbary, 33, was arrested at 8:30 p.m. Friday after allegedly killing her husband moments after he drove up behind a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper for help as the trooper wrote a motorist a ticket. The trooper's presence didn't scare the woman away; she allegedly shot him anyway.
For hours, police knew only a few facts: one shot, small caliber to the head, allegedly fired by the woman through the front windshield of a Nissan Pathfinder.
"Brain-damage" read a bumper sticker tacked onto the glove box door right above the passenger seat where the victim, with his head bleeding, fell on his side. The man's license plate also read "BRNDMGD."
"Did you see his plate?" one officer asked another at the scene. "That was true tonight."
The estranged husband and wife had met for dinner earlier at Dona Maria's on Craig Road. The woman was trying to get back together with him, but he didn't want to, police said. The woman allegedly fired at him in the parking lot and missed, and he fled in his car. The couple's 16-year-old son was at home, police said.
The husband, a carpet layer, drove onto I-15, then stopped about 30 feet behind Trooper Scott Majewski, who had pulled over a motorist for a burned out taillight. As Majewski was writing a ticket, he said a woman pulled up in a Chevrolet behind the man's utility vehicle and got out.
"It happened so fast," Majewski said at the North Las Vegas Police station after he finished writing his statement. "I heard a gunshot. I didn't realize it had come from the vehicle."
That's when he walked up to the Pathfinder and saw the shattered windshield and a man lying inside. Majewski pulled his gun and held Linda Carbary, whom he said was still holding an automatic handgun, while he waited for backup.
"I took her gun," Majewski said. "She complied with everything I told her to do."
It "seemed like forever, 20 years" for troopers and North Las Vegas Police to arrive, but he said it actually "was only minutes."
Because the Nissan and Linda Carbary's car didn't have flashers on and the woman appeared to be talking to the other driver, "I didn't see that they were a threat," Majewski said. "I kept checking on them. I kept them in the corner of my eye."
He said he "didn't hear anything other than a gunshot." The ticket for the unidentified driver was canceled and the man drove away.
Linda Carbary was taken to the North Las Vegas Police station for questioning. After she waived her rights for an attorney, detectives Jim Mitchell and Jon Martin, along with a female patrol officer, interviewed her. At 4 a.m. Saturday, about seven hours after the shooting, Carbary signed a statement admitting to the murder, police said. Afterward, as the handcuffed woman was escorted to the North Las Vegas jail, she was smiling and appeared confident, almost happy.
While investigating a homicide, police spend hours on the evidence, not just on interviewing suspects, said Lt. Chris Larotonda, "because our physical evidence should be able to support a conviction without a statement from the suspect."
And even though the case against Linda Carbary "seems rather cut and dry, a sloppy investigation on our part could lead to a mistrial."
In late January, North Las Vegas detectives thought they had the first homicide of the year. A man was found in a Stanford Street crack house, long ago abandoned by its owners who were jailed on drug charges. A bike cop, checking out the vacant house near Lake Mead Boulevard, found the man lying on a couch, covered with blankets.
The man appeared to have been killed, but that was only because he had been in the house for about a month, police said. Detectives had to investigate it as if it were a homicide until they knew for sure. They checked the property inside and out for clues to who may have been in the house at the time of the man's death. Someone had covered the man's body in blankets, Mitchell said. As it turned out, the man had overdosed while lying on a couch in the vacant house, dead from too much alcohol.
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