A 23-year-old man drove from New York to a Las Vegas suburb and crashed a rented Nissan Sentra through a gate and into a pile of heavy wire reels at a power substation before shooting himself in the head, local police said on Friday, describing the incident as a suspected act of terrorism.
The suspect, Dawson Noah Maloney, died of the self-inflicted shotgun wound, the Las Vegas sheriff, Kevin McMahill, said at a press conference on Friday. He was wearing soft body armor when police discovered him.
“There is no ongoing threat at this time,” he added.
Police initially heard about the incident in Boulder City when it was reported as a suicide.
Police discovered in the car two shotguns, an AR-style pistol, several magazines loaded with .223 ammunition, a box of shotgun shells, two flame-throwers, a crowbar, a hatchet and a cellphone.
In Maloney’s hotel room, police found material for making explosives, including thermite, ammonium nitrate, magnesium ribbon, metal pipes and gasoline. They also recovered several books “related to extremist ideologies, including right- and leftwing extremism, environmental extremism, white supremacy and anti-government ideology,” McMahill said.
“Given the location and the materials discovered, this incident was treated as a terrorism-related event,” McMahill said.
The Albany police department had received a missing report for Maloney, McMahill said. But he also said Maloney communicated with family members just before the incident, making “multiple statements referencing self-harm” and saying he would do something that would get him “on the news”. He wrote a message to his mother describing himself as a “dead terrorist son”, McMahill said.
The FBI is also investigating the incident. A search of two residences in the Albany area turned up gun parts and a 3D printer, according to Christopher Delzotto, the FBI’s Las Vegas special agent-in-charge.
The incident was first reported in the local press after McMahill mentioned it in passing during his “state of the department” address earlier on Friday.
“Just last night, our counter-terrorism teams were out and are still out working on an event that occurred here in our valley,” McMahill said. “It looks to have been a credible counter-terrorism threat.”
McMahill cited the event when discussing his department’s efforts to shore up its counter-terrorism unit.
Las Vegas has experienced several terroristic threats in recent years, McMahill said. But, he added, at the Department of Homeland Security “we see a degradation of what it is that we have relied on for a long time” because of the agency’s “focus on more immigration-type issues”.
Las Vegas had also historically overrelied on the New York police department’s intelligence gathering and dissemination through programs like “Operation Shield” and “Operation Sentry” for counter-terrorism work, he added. “We all feel at [Las Vegas] metro that we continue to be a target and we must do something different about it.”
