A 23-year-old man drove from New York to a Las Vegas suburb and shot himself in the head after crashing a rented Nissan Sentra through a gate and into a pile of huge wire reels at a power substation, local police said Friday.
The suspect, Dawson Noah Maloney, died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound, Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a press conference Friday. He was wearing soft body armor when spotted by police.
“There is no ongoing threat at this time,” he added.
Police initially heard the incident in Boulder City was reported as a suicide.
Police found two shotguns, an AR-style pistol, several magazines full of .223 ammunition, a box of shotgun shells, two flame-throwers, a crowbar, a hatchet and cell phones in the car.
In Maloney’s hotel room, police found materials needed to make explosives, including thermite, ammonium nitrate, magnesium ribbon, metal pipes and gasoline. They also “recovered a number of books related to extremist ideologies, including right and left-wing extremism, environmental extremism, white supremacy and anti-government ideology,” McMahill said.
“Based on the location and materials found, this incident is being treated as a terrorist-related incident,” McMahill said.
The Albany Police Department received a missing person’s report for Maloney, McMahill said. But he had communicated with Maloney’s family before the incident, made “several statements suggesting self-harm” and said he would do anything to get him “in the news”. McMahill said he wrote a message to his mother describing her as “the son of a dead terrorist.”
The FBI is also investigating the incident. According to Christopher Delzotto, the FBI’s Las Vegas special agent-in-charge, a search of two residences in the Albany area turned up gun parts and a 3D printer.
The incident was first reported in the local press after McMahill mentioned it in his “State of the Department” speech on Friday.
“Last night, our counter-terrorism teams were working and still working on an event here in our valley,” McMahill said. “This appears to be a credible counter-terrorism threat.”
McMahill cited the incident as he discussed his department’s efforts to beef up its counterterrorism unit.
Las Vegas has faced several terrorist threats in recent years, McMahill said. But, he added, at the Department of Homeland Security “we’re seeing the erosion of what we’ve relied on for so long” because of the agency’s “focus on more immigration-type issues.”
Las Vegas has also historically relied heavily on the New York Police Department for intelligence gathering and counterterrorism work through programs like “Operation Shield” and “Operation Sentry,” he added. “We’ve all felt it [Las Vegas] Metro continues to be our target and we need to do something different about it.
