‘I forgive him’: Daughter of picnic-slaying victim tearful in testimony

By Ricardo Torres-Cortez

Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019 | 2 a.m.

Rachel Lee listened as the convicted killer read a statement to explain why he took her mother Mia Banks’ life during a company outing last year at Sunset Park.

Lee would also hear from a defense attorney that the man — who pleaded guilty in September to murder and attempted murder charges — has faced a lifetime of undiagnosed autism and that his body and brain have been afflicted by Type 1 diabetes. Anthony Wrobel also shot another one of his bosses, who survived the attempted murder.

Wrobel, facing life in prison, stood in front of a Clark County district judge on Thursday waiting to hear his punishment. The only question that remained Thursday was when Wrobel, 44, would be eligible for parole: 30, 38, 44 years?

Either way, attorney Joseph Abood theorized, his client’s body probably will have given out by then.

But when it came time for shooting survivor Hector Rodriguez to respond, he was angry. After all, he said he could still see the scars Wrobel left him when he opened fire April 15, 2018, under a gazebo at a company picnic for Venetian employees.

Rodriguez said that he, through no fault of his own, was handed a lifetime sentence of painful recovery.

He’s undergone multiple surgeries and there are still bullet fragments lodged in his body, he said. The founding fathers, he countered, would “roll over in their graves” if they saw a court that afforded Wrobel mercy, he later concluded.

Then it was time for Banks’ daughters Rachel and Angela Lee, 28, to speak. Angela has had recurring nightmares about that fateful day, the uncertainty that followed in a hospital waiting room and the realization that her mother was gone.

It’s still shocking, she said, wiping away tears.

Rachel Lee, 21, was so distraught she could barely read the statement she prepared. But she pulled together the strength to tell those in the silent Las Vegas courtroom about her life: from the joys of being born to an independent woman and the heartache of losing her.

And when it came time to address the person who caused her pain, she taught the room a lesson in grace, grief and maturity. The judge was in tears by the end.

“I forgive him,” she told Judge Douglas Herndon. “I forgive you,” she told Anthony Wrobel, who sitting on the other side of the small courtroom.

Wrobel, a former Strip table games dealer, was handed a life sentence with the possibility of parole in 38 years — more than the 30-year recommendation, but less than the 44-years-to-life he could have received, according to the Associated Press.

Metro Police and prosecutors had alleged Wrobel, a disgruntled employee at the Venetian, had planned on killing his bosses during a picnic outing at Sunset Park. After the shooting, he drove through southwest United States and ended up days later in the Texas panhandle where he was arrested while he slept at a truck stop.

Rachel Lee aspires to her mother’s work ethic, which allowed a woman to climb from table games dealer to vice president of gaming operations at a major Strip property. She worked in a man’s world and made it look easy, Rachel Lee said. The shooter unjustly took her rock, security and her light in the darkness, she said.

Rachel Lee remembers the family having to pick her mother’s last outfit. She vowed not to look at her mother’s remains in the casket during viewing because she didn’t want that to be her last memory, she told the court.

She was shaking and her stomach in knots when she stepped in front of the casket and “saw someone who looked like mom, but it was not her.”

It was then, she said, that she knew “she was in a better place. She was no longer suffering.”