metro police
Andrew Cote
Published Friday, June 26, 2020 | 2:16 p.m.
Updated Friday, June 26, 2020 | 10:45 p.m.
Residents of this Las Vegas neighborhood knew about the ongoing dispute brewing between a pastor and an elderly woman on their street. They didn’t think it would boil over late Thursday when the 36-year-old man grabbed a shotgun and killed his next-door neighbor and a man accompanying her.
Metro Police also was aware of the ongoing, yearslong feud, Lt. Ray Spencer said early Friday. Dispatch logs show the department had been summoned to the victim’s house at least seven times this year, including less than 10 hours before the killings, when someone reported an unknown disturbance.
Andrew Martin Cote, 36, was booked Friday at the Clark County Detention Center on two counts of murder, according to jail and dispatch logs and public property records.
At 10:03 p.m., it was Cote who called police to the house next door to his, located at 4413 Mossy Rock Court, where he said he’d shot two people, Spencer said.
Officers arrived at the scene and found the bodies of a woman in her 70s and a man in his 50s in the backyard, Spencer said. Cote was taken into custody at his home without further incident. The Clark County Coroner’s Office hadn’t publicly named the victims Friday afternoon, but a KLAS-TV reporter who’d spoken to the elderly woman’s family identified her as Mildred Olivo, 71.
At dusk, less than 24 hours after sirens swarmed Mossy Rock Court, near Decatur Boulevard and Smoke Ranch Road, neighbors lingered outside their homes. Several of them spoke with the Sun on condition that their names wouldn’t be used.
On the verge of breaking down Friday evening, a woman threw her head back as soon as she found out Olivo, a kind, Puerto Rican woman had been killed.
Not a news consumer, the neighbor only found out about the slayings when her daughter called her from out of state Friday to let her know about the crime a couple of doors away from her house. She didn’t find out Olivo was the victim until a reporter told her.
The woman said she and her puppies were in the backyard as fireworks were exploding in the area. She went inside after two loud, distinctive blasts went off. When the increasingly deafening sirens approached, she only thought that maybe something had caught fire.
She said she befriended Olivo over a year ago when she went to the elderly woman’s yard sale. That day, she said, Olivo told her she’d been having problems with her next-door neighbor, whom she disliked.
They didn’t have such an in-depth conversation after meeting, but waved at each other when passing by.
A source of contention, the woman and a second neighbor said, was about Olivo bathing in her backyard hot tub and Cote yelling at her to put on some clothes.
The two houses, near a cul-de-sac, are within spitting distance. Their front doors face each other. Olivo’s Puerto Rico flag, and Cote’s Gadsden flag hang at an angle, facing each other.
At some point, the second neighbor said, Cote, propelled by the hot tub disagreements, built a fence to create some privacy. He estimated the neighborhood tiff had been going on about a decade.
Talking about Cote, the woman said Friday that he was amiable, a pastor who was proficient in Spanish and had invited her to his church multiple times. She further described him as a married man with young kids who played in the street. People across the street said Cote kept to himself.
But overall, the five interviewed for this story said they knew about the hostility between Olivo and Cote, either because they told them, they saw it, or because they’d seen police in the neighborhood.
It wasn’t clear exactly what led to Cote allegedly pulling the trigger, but Spencer confirmed the discord had been going on for years, noting that at least one of those involved in the shooting had obtained a restraining order against their neighbor.
Details on the temporary protective order were scarce, and immediate online searches through logs of local courts didn’t bring up a case. Spencer said that at some point the order had been violated.
Clark County property records show that Cote bought the house on 4417 Mossy Rock almost 12 years ago. It was unclear how long Olivo lived at the address next door. Information on her relationship to the second victim wasn’t released. Neighbors said Olivo lived alone.
Metro dispatch logs in 2020 show that officers had been summoned to the victim's house at least seven times, all of which occurred after February. On March 4, someone at 4413 Mossy Rock Court called to report a malicious destruction of property. The subsequent six reports varied between citizen assistance calls and disturbances at the same address, including Thursday’s 12:43 p.m. call.
Information on either incident wasn’t available Friday.
Just after 10 p.m. Thursday, after shells erupted from the shotgun, several residents told detectives that they’d heard the shooting but hadn’t witnessed the bloodshed.
Same for the young children and adults inside Cote’s house, Spencer said.
Neighborhood disputes occur, but Las Vegas police aren’t used to seeing them end tragically. Noting the fact, Spencer called the double-slaying “extremely tragic.”
A woman who lives across the street from Olivo’s house, whom she’d affectionately known as “Millie,” said that they’d had friendly interactions for years. But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that it turned into a real friendship. The woman said that after she helped Olivo when she fractured a bone in her foot, the elderly woman showed up to her house with a basket of muffins. She knew about the ongoing fight and the sporadic police response, noting that she’d seen the suspect and victim bickering before.
She said Olivo had a “good, spunk personality. She didn’t bother anybody. We all kind of just loved her. Yeah, she was cool.”
Though she didn’t hear the rounds that killed the two victims, as soon as she found out there was a shooting in her neighborhood, she had a feeling who one of the victims was: “I just knew.”
