Miranda Alam / Special to Weekly
Leilani Tauiliili Holmes is shown in her Las Vegas home Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019. Her son, David, was shot and killed by his roommate in August.
Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019 | 2 a.m.
Leilani Tauiliili Holmes wonders if the death of her son, David Tauiliili, could have been prevented.
It was close to midnight Aug. 12 when the mother of five received a call informing her that Tauiliili, 19, had been shot in the head by his roommate. Although Tauiliili’s death was ruled a homicide by the Clark County Coroner, Holmes believes it was an accident.
Tauiliili, affectionately known as DeeJay, was one 233 people in Clark County who lost their lives in incidents involving firearms this year as of Aug. 31.
Holmes said that Tauiliili and his roommate were playing around with a gun when the roommate accidentally shot him in the forehead. Holmes believes the roommate was not properly trained in gun safety, even though her son was. They had purchased guns to protect themselves from home invasions, she said.
“Knowing my son, I know that when they do things that could be dangerous, he’s always taking precaution and making sure that he’s not doing something that’s unsafe,” Holmes said.
Las Vegas entered the national conversation on firearms and shootings two years ago with the Route 91 Harvest Festival massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Fifty-eight people were gunned down at the country music festival on the Strip on Oct. 1, 2017.
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Although mass shootings receive the most attention, they only account for a small fraction of deaths caused by guns nationwide. That holds true in Las Vegas.
In 2018, the year after the mass shooting, 450 people in Clark County were killed by guns, an average of 1.2 people per day, according to data from the Clark County Coroner’s Office. The youngest victims were infants. The oldest was 88.
Nevada ranked 14th in the nation in firearm deaths per capita in 2017 based on the latest data available from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence estimates that someone is killed with a gun every 19 hours in Nevada.
While the Nevada Legislature passed significant gun reforms this year, the state has historically had lax laws on firearm ownership and safety compared to some other states. The toll that those limited restrictions have had, some victims say, has been immense.
“Nobody thinks of it until it’s their kid,” said Jamika Johnson Murray, whose cousin LaMadre Harris was killed last November in a random shooting in North Las Vegas.
Harris, 16, known to family and friends as Man-Man, was with his sister and a few other teenagers at a strip mall off Centennial Parkway and Goldfield Street on the afternoon of Nov. 13 when he was approached by 18-year-old Al’Dijon Williams, Johnson recalled.
“None of them had ever met this boy in their life until that moment,” Johnson said. “But this little boy was mad with my Man-Man over some girl they had in common.”
Police said Williams approached Harris and shot him twice until he fell to the ground. Then, according to a North Las Vegas Police report, Williams laughed and shot him again. Johnson said
Harris’ sister then was targeted but the gun “didn’t go off.”
Police told the Harris family that Williams was serving parole for another violent crime at the time of the shooting, Johnson said. When officers searched the suspect’s home, they found that he had amassed dozens of weapons, she said.
“We’re talking about an angry kid with access to a firearm he shouldn’t have had in the first place,” Johnson said.
Harris, a student at Legacy High School, loved to dance and rap, cared immensely for his family and “was always laughing,” Johnson said.
“He was a good kid, he really was,” she said. “He had a very loving spirit.”
One year after Harris’ death, his family remains shaken. They’ve moved out of the North Las Vegas neighborhood they had called home for over three years, Johnson said.
Harris’ mother is terrified that someone else in her family “could be next,” Johnson said. His sister feels unsafe and is struggling to move on after having seen her brother die.
“This little girl, she’s traumatized. This ruined her ability to cope. She’s always angry,” Johnson said. “It’s a lot.”
Gun violence remains a significant problem in their community, she added. She wants people to understand that senseless murders, especially of young people, have a lifelong impact on those who know the deceased.
Eight years after the death of her 4-year-old daughter Dayla, Stephanie Pizzoferrato can relate.
The blonde-haired, “ordinary little girl” was with family members on public lands not far from the M Resort on March 6, 2011, when she was struck in the head by a stray bullet. Two days later, Dayla was pronounced dead.
Pizzoferrato still gets tears in her eyes when she recalls what happened. Dayla was with her father, grandfather and twin brother in an area that permitted open shooting and other activities, including hiking and off-roading. Dayla stayed in the car the entire time while the men went out to shoot. No one nearby appeared to be shooting at the moment but Dayla was hit by a bullet.
The family never learned the origin of the fatal shot, but police determined that the bullet ricocheted twice and traveled “a very far distance” before hitting Dayla, Pizzoferrato said.
“I hate calling it an accident, because it’s preventable. And I’d say most survivors don’t call incidents like these accidents because they are preventable,” said Pizzoferrato, now an activist for gun law reforms and gun violence prevention.
Guns, gun problems
About 37.5% of Nevadans own one or more guns, above the national average of 29.1%, according to a 2015 survey conducted by researchers at Harvard and Boston University.
Research shows that communities with more guns overwhelmingly experience more gun violence, said David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who has been studying gun violence in the United States for more than two decades.
“Logically, it’s really hard to have a lot of gun problems if there are no guns,” Hemenway said.
The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are the result of suicides. Clark County is no exception. Suicides comprised 60% of all gun fatalities here last year, according to data from the Clark County coroner’s office.
Other studies, including one by Hemenway from 2007, indicate that people who live in U.S. regions where firearms are common are more likely to die from suicide. Hemenway’s 2007 study, which examined data across all 50 states, also found “a positive and significant association” between the number of firearms in a household and the rate of suicides from firearms; suicide by other means showed no correlation with firearm ownership, the study found.
“The (general) population still thinks if you want to kill yourself, you will,” Hemenway said. “But it turns out that the availability of lethal means really affects the likelihood that someone will die in a suicide.”
A self-inflicted gunshot is the most common means of suicide in the United States — and by far the most lethal. Although a 2002 system review of 90 studies and four databases found that 90% of people who survived a suicide attempt would not die from another attempt, those who turn a gun on themselves rarely get a second chance.
This reality has led Las Vegan Linda Cavazos to conclude that if her younger brother hadn’t been able to access a gun in 1980, he might still be alive today.
Cavazos’ brother, Louie Pacheco, took his own life with a gun at the age of 26. He never owned firearms, and Cavazos believed he would not have been able to obtain them “through legal means.” “I knew he had a lot of friends who liked to go hunting and who possessed a lot of guns. He had friends who had been in the military,” she said.
At least two laws recently enacted in Nevada could have possibly saved her brother, who Cavazos and her family knew was depressed. One is Nevada’s “red flag” law, which will allow people to petition the courts to temporarily confiscate firearms from a family member who is considered a threat — including to oneself.
“(With) the red flag laws now, I’m thinking that could’ve been something where we could’ve notified someone. He didn’t have an actual gun in the home, but he had easy access and we knew he had easy access,” said Cavazos, now a member of the Clark County School District Board of Trustees and an advocate for “common sense gun laws” in Nevada.
Another positive development, Cavazos said, is the establishment of universal background checks for nearly all gun transfers and sales in Nevada. This measure, approved by voters through a 2016 ballot question and signed into law this year by Gov. Steve Sisolak, closes a loophole that previously allowed unlicensed sellers to avoid background checks and generally forbids people from lending guns to others.
Embedded in the red flag law is another potentially life-saving measure, noted Pizzoferrato: It will soon be a misdemeanor to negligently or improperly store a firearm if one “knows or has reason to know” that a child could access it.
Pizzoferrato isn’t opposed to gun ownership, she stressed; her boyfriend, a police officer, owns weapons. All Pizzoferrato wants is to see reforms enacted that will save lives.
“Planning a funeral for your child is something I don’t want for any parent,” she said.
Johnson, a gun owner herself, said she supports “more extensive” background checks and laws mandating proper storage of all guns, especially to keep them away from children.
“If you have that type of firepower in your house, you should be required to have a gun safe,” Johnson said.
Holmes believes that people should be required to go through training classes before being allowed to get a gun.
“Just like how they have us take exams for driver’s tests and certifications in careers, they should do that for guns,” she said.
Few federal gun reforms have passed in recent years, as Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has refused to bring gun control bills that have passed the House of Representatives to the Senate floor for a vote. But conversations about guns are beginning to change, Hemenway said, in part because of mass shootings.
“What the mass shootings do is more and more people recognize that everyone is at risk,” Hemenway said.
Pizzoferrato sees that the conversation is changing as well. But she still grieves when thinking about the hundreds of lives lost to firearms in our community every year, leaving behind anguished families and traumatized children.
“It saddens me that it takes mass shootings for people to recognize and identify that this is a crisis, because people are dying on streets every day,” she said.
