A government official was arrested on the charge of open murder in the stabbing death of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, police said Thursday.
Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, 45, who German had spent months reporting on, was taken into custody Wednesday, police said. German, 69, was found dead Saturday morning, the county coroner’s office said, and his cause of death was multiple sharp-force injuries.
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Telles was a person of interest early in the investigation as authorities considered work-related grievances or conflicts, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Capt. Dori Koren said at a news conference Thursday. He did not disclose a specific motive.
Upon a search of Telles’s home, police recovered a pair of shoes and a straw hat that matched those worn in a previously released photo of the suspect, police said Thursday. Both items were cut, likely in an attempt to destroy evidence, Koren said. He added that Telles’s DNA was a positive match for DNA recovered from the crime scene.
“Telles was upset about articles that were being written by German as an investigative journalist that exposed potential wrongdoing, and Telles has publicly expressed his issues with that reporting,” Koren said Thursday.
A well-known journalist in Nevada, German covered the unrest in Telles’s office, his alleged relationship with a subordinate staffer and allegations the county official’s employees made against him, which included bullying, favoritism and emotional stress. In June, Telles conceded a Democratic primary race for the post to his deputy and took jabs at German’s reporting on Twitter.
“Looking forward to lying smear piece #4 by @JGermanRJ,” Telles wrote in a June 18 tweet. “#onetrickpony I think he’s mad that I haven’t crawled into a hole and died.”
In the weeks before German was killed, he was planning a follow-up piece on Telles, the Review-Journal reported. He had been waiting on a public-records request.
“We are relieved Telles is in custody and outraged that a colleague appears to have been killed for reporting on an elected official,” Review-Journal Executive Editor Glenn Cook said to the paper. “Journalists can’t do the important work our communities require if they are afraid a presentation of facts could lead to violent retribution.”
Fifty journalists and media workers worldwide have been killed this year, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Those deaths included people who died during dangerous assignments and those who seemed to have been targeted.
German is the only reported death of a journalist or media worker in the United States this year; since 1992, 16 have been killed across the country.
One of the worst attacks on an American newspaper was in 2018, when a gunman killed five people and wounded several others at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md. The gunman had previously lost a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for its 2011 coverage of a criminal harassment charge against him. Prosecutors argued he was out for “revenge,” and the jury found him criminally responsible for the rampage.
In a statement to the Review-Journal, German’s family said they were “shocked, saddened and angry about his death.”
“Jeff was committed to seeking justice for others and would appreciate the hard work by local police and journalists in pursuing his killer,” the statement said. “We look forward to seeing justice done in this case.”
Recounting the timeline of the incident, Koren said German had an altercation with the suspect Friday morning around 11 a.m. near the side of his home, after which he was stabbed multiple times.
For decades, German covered labor, courts, organized crime, political scandals and more in Las Vegas, joining the Review-Journal in 2010 after spending more than 20 years at the Las Vegas Sun. His colleagues remembered him as a fierce journalist who was committed to his craft.
Over the course of his career, German became known for his wide-ranging investigative work and coverage of high-profile stories on politics and organized crime. He wrote the 2001 true-crime book “Murder in Sin City: The Death of a Las Vegas Casino Boss,” and he led the paper’s investigation of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in modern U.S. history. He hosted the Review-Journal’s podcast, “Mobbed Up.”
Cook told The Washington Post in a statement that German had not told the paper’s leadership about any concerns for his safety. Police said there was no threat to the public after the stabbing, the Review-Journal reported.
On Monday, police released a surveillance image of the person suspected of killing German. The photo showed an image of a person wearing a large straw hat and an orange reflective shirt. The next day, police released another photo, this time of the vehicle tied to the suspect: a maroon GMC Yukon Denali.
After police released the vehicle’s image on Tuesday, Review-Journal reporters saw Telles standing next to a matching vehicle in his driveway. The GMC and a second vehicle were towed from Telles’s property on Wednesday afternoon, the Review-Journal reported.
On Thursday, Koren said the GMC was registered to Telles’s wife, and police had video evidence that showed the vehicle departing around 9 a.m. on the day of the murder and returning after 12 p.m., matching the incident timeline.
Early Wednesday afternoon, Telles arrived at his home, appearing to wear a white hazmat suit, videos posted online by reporters show.
“Did you commit this murder?” one reporter asked on the video. “Did you do this?”
As reporters continued asking Telles questions, he silently walked through the garage and closes it.
Later on, local media reported an hours-long standoff outside Telles’s home Wednesday. Videos posted online showed SWAT team members outside the official’s home and an individual being carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. Police said in the Thursday news conference that Telles had self-inflicted, non-life-threatening injuries, but did not disclose the nature of the injuries.
Officials said the case is still ongoing, and remains a priority for Las Vegas police.
“Every murder is tragic, but the killing of a journalist is particularly troublesome,” Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
In remembrance of German, Review-Journal editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez created a piece titled “His light will shine on.”
The cartoon shows a typewriter illuminated by the halo of a candle alongside a verse from the Bible: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.”
Elahe Izadi contributed to this report.
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