Jarrid Johnson (courtesy Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept.)
While walking the dog near dawn on the shortest day of 2018–December 21–I found the murdered, mutilated body of a homeless man less than a football field away from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters. His name was Ralph Franzello, 63.
The person who killed him with multiple stabbings of a knife–Franzello’s knife–turned out to be Jarrid Johnson, a local man who at the time was 25. Perhaps burdened by a guilty conscience, he walked into the Clark County Detention Center a few days later on Christmas Eve and confessed to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police homicide detectives.
According to court records, after lengthy plea bargain talks apparently delayed by the pandemic, Johnson yesterday filed papers agreeing to plead guilty but mentally ill in Clark County District Court to second degree murder. Nevada law allows a guilty but mentally ill plea–most states don’t–but all it seems to mean here is that he is supposed to receive some mental health treatment while incarcerated.
As tragic as this whole situation is, there also is a big underlying governmental accountability issue here, which I wrote about a few weeks after the murder. Johnson had been in jail on a charge of battery upon a relative–apparently an uncle–with a sword. To me, attacking a loved one with a sword suggests mental illness big time. Yet the judge–Karen P. Bennett-Haron of Las Vegas Township Justice Court–had released him from custody on his own recognizance on the motion of his public defender with the approval of the Clark County prosecutor’s office without even requiring that Johnson appear in court so he could be sized up in person.
Not 36 hours later, Franzello was killed in the middle of the night on a desolate street behind a supermarket he shopped at under a streetlight that wasn’t working. Had Johnson been in jail–or even in an outpatient facility–getting the treatment he so clearly needed, Franzello, who according to a sibling moved to Las Vegas from my native state of New Jersey more than 20 years ago and eventually became homeless, might still be alive today.
But of course, Nevada is a minimal government, minimal tax state. Such services are in short supply. The police press release trumpeting Johnson’s arrest did not mention the inconvenient fact that authorities had just released him despite his needy state. Continue reading
