LAS VEGAS (AP) - Three years before a fire killed six people at the Alpine Apartments, a Las Vegas police captain and his officers worked hard to close the former downtown motel as a chronic nuisance, city records show.
But despite more than 150 police calls for service in that time, city officials opposed the move, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal investigation.
A previous Review-Journal probe showed the downtown property was the subject of repeated code enforcement and failed fire inspections between 2013 and 2017, and had not been inspected by fire officials for 32 months before the fire last December.
“I tried to close the Alpine,” said Andrew Walsh, the area police commander at the time who was promoted to deputy police chief at the end of 2017. But he told the Review-Journal he had to defer to city officials about whether to designate the property a chronic nuisance.
“When this was happening, we were shocked at the conditions,” he said.
Donald Walford, a downtown businessman who is part of a group dubbed the “God Squad” trying to clean up the area, said a city nuisance action might have prevented loss of life.
But, “They didn’t have the stomach to do this,” Walford said.
City spokesman Jace Radke declined to arrange an interview with city inspectors but issued a statement saying issues that police raised about the Alpine “were criminal in nature, not issues related to property maintenance or building or zoning code violations.”
“While our chronic nuisance ordinance allows action for repeated criminal activity, evidence must be presented and the property owner must have an opportunity to remedy the situation,” the statement said.
Las Vegas’ chronic nuisance ordinance can be a powerful tool to fight problem property owners.
But since 2017, according to city records, only one property was deemed dangerous enough to close under the law, the Review-Journal found. That property, the Safari Motel, not far from the Alpine, had a fatal shooting and was the focus of repeated police drug raids.
Under the ordinance, the city can ask a judge to order boarding up the building for up to a year and could charge the owner with a misdemeanor if there are repeated crimes on the property, or the property was used for drug production or sales.
The city refused to go forward against the Alpine before the December 2019 fire, but city staff started looking into the chronic nuisance ordinance afterward. Inspectors noted more than 40 fire code violations, records show, including an exit door bolted shut from the outside.
Downtown activists and residents complained for years that the Alpine and other area properties attracted drug and gang activity, according to police emails and interviews with several residents obtained under state open records laws. Walsh and his officers apparently took those concerns seriously.
“(C)an you have Fire Inspectors check the Alpine Motel for me,” Walsh wrote deputy city attorney David Bailey on March 10, 2016. “I’m getting a ton of complaints about the conditions there.”
That same month, police contacted Alpine workers about junk cars on the property, and met with the manager about trash on the property, police logs show. Police received 10 calls of disturbances and assaults at the site, including a shooting in the hallways during that month, service call logs show.
“We had a shooting at the Alpine over the weekend,” Walsh wrote Bailey on March 28, 2016. “This place needs to go.”
Bailey emailed Walsh several times that March, saying the owner was making fixes. Bailey did not respond to requests for comment.
On March 31, 2016, Police Officer Steven Rollo wrote that he was working on a chronic nuisance action against the Alpine and wanted city staff help identifying Alpine owner Adolfo Orozco’s other properties in Las Vegas.
In Nov. 3, 2016, email, Walsh faulted city officials for finding dozens of problems at the Alpine but failing to close it. He said police couldn’t solve the problem with arrests.
“Everyone did a great job in going out and finding the violations which I believe were upwards of 70 different violations … from building codes to fire violations … and the property remained open and is still the number one property with regard to the complaints I receive,” he wrote.
In an interview with the Review-Journal, Walsh declined to criticize city officials but said police were intent on cleaning up the Alpine.
“As captain, I wanted a safe place for people to live, a safe place for people to work and a safe place for people to visit,” he said.
Police continued to receive calls about thefts, assaults, a domestic violence with a knife and other disturbances at the Alpine, but city officials did not act on the police push for a chronic nuisance designation.
On Jan. 11, 2017, Anthony Krieg, a code enforcement officer, wrote his supervisor that he and Rollo told Orozco that he had to vet his tenants. “The fact that he rents to anyone and does no background checks just contributes to the criminal activity,” Krieg wrote.
Krieg referred Review-Journal questions to city public relations staff. Ozuna did not respond to repeated calls and email seeking comment.
On the same date as the email, a Southern Nevada Health District inspection found trash, used needles, feces and other debris on the property. Health inspectors closed that case three months later, after a re-inspection showed the debris had been cleaned up.
The last time fire inspectors visited the property before the fire was in April 2017.
Las Vegas Councilman Cedric Crear, whose ward includes the Alpine, promised after the fire a full and thorough investigation of what he said “seemed to be a lot of discrepancies going on at that facility.” He did not respond to repeated Review-Journal requests for comment about the chronic nuisance ordinance.
The newspaper noted the nuisance law can be invoked after three or more nuisance violations in any 30 day period- anything from weeds and graffiti to violence and drugs.
Dominic Gentile, one of Orozco’s attorneys, agreed the ordinance is broadly written but said the fact the city didn’t use it against the Alpine showed the property was appropriately managed and maintained.
Walsh acknowledged that closing Alpine Apartments would have meant finding different places for low-income residents to live. Officials have said about 50 people lived at the 41-unit former motel built in 1972.
But Father Courtney Edward Krier, pastor of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church less than a block from the Alpine, said it should have been closed.
“It’s really, really difficult for me to understand why the city doesn’t deal with these properties or doesn’t want to have the bother and worry,” he said. “This one won’t go away – it will be there forever because lives were lost.”
While the Alpine escaped chronic nuisance designation, city officials cracked down on the Safari Motel after a maintenance man was fatally shot in April 2016 and police served drug search warrants on four different rooms in early 2017.
Safari owner Wendy Yeh, in documents fighting the action, claimed officials pressured her to sell the property for a reduced price. She also complained the city had not provided redevelopment assistance that neighboring properties received.
A judge allowed the city to close the Safari in the fall of 2017. Records show Yeh sold the property in May 2019 to Beverly Hills company for $950,000 and the city then gave the new developer $95,000 to help with a $440,000 renovation.
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