metro police
Trent Leach
Published Thursday, Sept. 23, 2021 | 12:50 p.m.
Updated Thursday, Sept. 23, 2021 | 5:46 p.m.
Metro Police today identified the officer involved in a fatal shooting earlier this week during a standoff in downtown Las Vegas.
Officer Zachary Adam, 41, fatally shot Trent Xavier Leach, 30, who was shooting a 9 mm handgun “indiscriminately” outside a vacant building in the 300 block of 11th Street on Tuesday, Assistant Sheriff Andrew Walsh said at a media briefing.
Adam has been employed with Metro since 2006 and is assigned to the Homeland Security Division, part of the Special Weapons and Tactics Bureau, Walsh said. Adam was placed on paid leave, pending a review of the incident.
Officers were dispatched to a building near 11th and Lewis Avenue at 9:23 a.m. Tuesday for a report of a person with a gun, police said. Responding officers made contact with Leach, who fled to a nearby vacant building after assaulting a man he was arguing with, Walsh said.
Police considered it a barricade situation, and crisis negotiators and SWAT were called to the scene, Walsh said. Negotiators had attempted to communicate with Leach for several hours.
About 2:30 p.m., the man pointed his gun at officers, prompting Adam to open fire, Walsh said. Leach was pronounced dead at the scene. Nobody else was injured.
Leach fired approximately 20 shots, and rounds struck a nearby apartment and surrounding police vehicles, Walsh said. Had Leach survived, he would have been arrested for battery with a deadly weapon, assaulting a public officer, resisting arrest, discharging a weapon into/near an occupied vehicle, and discharging a firearm from, at or into an occupied structure, Walsh said.
The incident resulted in the sixth officer-involved shooting in Metro’s jurisdiction this year, and the third fatal police shooting, Walsh said.
