Friday, April 28, 2000 | 11:08 a.m.
The deadly Henderson armored car robbery in March and the June 1999 botched armored car heist at the Desert Inn hotel-casino are connected, Henderson and Metro Police said Thursday.
Police would not reveal what evidence led them to determine the the two violent holdups were linked. Investigators are trying to identify the suspects in the robberies, said Lt. John Alamshaw of Metro's robbery unit.
"There are potential suspects that we are looking at and we're doing the hard-nosed police work that is necessary to solve these," said Capt. Richard Perkins of the Henderson Police. "This is the type of crime that you either solve right away or it will take a lengthy investigation. I'm confident we will solve this."
Police have described the March 3 robbery in front of the Ross Dress for Less store in the Whitney Ranch Center on Stephanie Street in Henderson both as well planned and extremely violent. The Desert Inn holdup also led to the assailants firing off bullets into a crowded parking lot, wounding two guards.
"They have also shown a proclivity to take a human life," Perkins said. "I would obviously consider them very dangerous."
In the Henderson armored car holdup, Armored Transport of Nevada guards Richard F. Sosa and Gary Dean Prestidge II were killed by assault rifle fire.
The three suspects obviously had planned out the robbery. Police say hours before the deadly encounter with the guards, the robbers waited inside two stolen minivans in the parking lot in front of the store.
Two men confronted Prestidge as he was carrying a money bag, and a gunfight started. Prestidge was able to get off five shots and wounded one of the three robbers before he died. Sosa was shot and killed while still inside the armored truck. The robbers fled with three money bags in a getaway car, but dumped that vehicle off at a nearby mall and escaped in another car they had waiting.
The two armored car holdups also are simular to the October 1999 armored car heist at the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino and the ambush of armored car guards at the MGM Grand hotel-casino in 1998.
Police, however, do not have a solid link between those two holdups and the more recent ones. But Alamshaw said detectives suspect they all may be connected.
Detectives from Henderson and Metro are working together to not only track down suspects in the two robberies they have connected, but also see if they can determine a link between all four, Alamshaw said.
The FBI is also working with local detectives in the armored car robberies by helping to chase down out-of-state leads, said Special Agent Joseph Dickey, a spokesman for the local FBI office.
"We are also checking armored car robberies that occur in other states to see if they are connected to the Henderson robbery," Dickey said. "So far we have not found any that are connected."
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