Police say suspect in downtown Las Vegas killing had stolen car
A man suspected of killing a woman in her downtown Las Vegas apartment had stolen his friend’s car and left a bullet at the scene, police said.
Friends told police that everyone knew Ashleigh Figearo, 37, left her back door open for her cat to go out. A report from the Metropolitan Police Department released Monday said that was how Jesus Gonzalez, 42, got inside the woman’s home and shot her at her kitchen table.
Figearo was found Jan. 8 by her neighbors in the 200 block of North 17th Street. Detectives traced a 9mm cartridge left at the scene to three prior shootings, according to the report. The first shooting, in January 2022, resulted in Gonzalez’s arrest.
Details were not provided for the other two shootings, which were both reported this month.
The gun was registered to a woman who said she let Gonzalez borrow her black Chevy Equinox on Jan. 7, but when she woke up the next day, he had not returned it. The woman told police she tracked her vehicle to an abandoned lot, but the address was redacted from the police report.
Gonzalez said he did not have the keys to the SUV, the report stated, and he did not know where the gun was that she left in the trunk.
A woman called police on Jan. 10 to say Gonzalez was looking for a man whose name was redacted from the report. That man found Figearo earlier on Jan. 8, but “he was scared to call the police because he had felony warrants.”
“Her back door was always left open so that her cat could come and go from outside,” the woman told police.
Gonzalez was booked into a Los Angeles area jail this month and is awaiting extradition to Las Vegas, where he faces charges of murder and burglary.
Gonzalez has prior charges in Las Vegas dating back to 2002, when he was charged in a robbery and a burglary five months apart, according to court records.
He was charged with possession of a stolen vehicle in 2019 and 2o21. In the first case, he plead guilty to resisting a police officer, and all charges were dropped in the second case.
He was sentenced to prison in 2011 for possession of a firearm by an ex-felon, in 2016 for mistreatment of a police animal and in February for discharging a weapon where a person might be endangered.
Four days after the February sentencing, he was charged as a fugitive from another state. He was ordered to return to the other state, which was not listed, within a month of completing his six-month sentence in Las Vegas.
Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.
