FBI agent who led Oct. 1 investigation retiring
FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse retired Thursday, the agency said.
Rouse worked for the FBI for 25 years, most recently serving in the Las Vegas bureau. He was tasked with investigating and preparing the agency’s behavioral analysis report on the Route 91 shooting in October 2017, just one year after joining the team.
In frequent interviews after the shooting, Rouse said he had no plans to withhold information, noting “We want to get it right.”
In the nine months it took to produce the report, Rouse and Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo held press conferences together where they provided updates, including the undetermined motive behind the shooting.
In 2018, Rouse oversaw the creation of the Joint Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit, or JCARD, to investigate child abductions. The FBI’s Las Vegas division had been working to develop the multi-agency team since 2015 and at the time it began, the team consisted of 40 investigators from Las Vegas valley police departments, the Esmeralda County Sheriff’s Office, the Mesquite Police Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Nevada attorney general’s office, the National Park Service, Red Rock Search and Rescue, and the FBI.
Rouse first joined the FBI in 1996 with a focus on violent crime in the Washington Field Office, according to the FBI’s website.
He recalled his time in Washington in a 2021 interview with the Review-Journal, specifically speaking on how the terrorist attacks on 9/11 changed the way he looked at the world.
“We were just working 24/7,” he said. “When you’re involved in something like that, you don’t really realize how long the days are. You’re operating on necessity.”
He also worked in Tampa, San Antonio and the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI before moving to Las Vegas.
A replacement had not been announced as of Friday.
Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.
