Kwame Banks, a 26-year-old Black man, was shot to death on the night of February 21, 2017, inside the Sky Pointe Landing Apartments in northwest Las Vegas. Neighbors heard an argument escalate into a fistfight, followed by two gunshots. Officers found Banks in a carport area and he was pronounced dead at the scene; the coroner determined he died from a single gunshot wound to the chest.
Detectives mapped a violent, hurried aftermath around his body: two spent cartridge cases, bloody shoe prints leading away between parked cars, a torn latex glove with its matching piece near the exit, and a separate black glove nearby. Three cell phones were recovered—two belonging to Banks and a third later tied to a suspect—and investigators learned that his pockets appeared to have been rifled. The next day, Banks’s car was found burned and stripped of its plates about a half-mile from the scene. Digital forensics ultimately revealed messages arranging a meeting and discussing money and “bags,” pointing investigators toward a robbery set-up.
In the immediate days after the killing, police had only a general description of a fleeing assailant. Over the ensuing months, the inquiry zeroed in on Larry D. Brown. Detectives linked one of the recovered phones to Brown with an Atlanta address, matched footwear impressions to shoes later found at his residence, and connected DNA on both gloves to him. Brown was arrested by a fugitive apprehension team in Atlanta and booked in Las Vegas on charges including murder with the use of a deadly weapon and robbery.
A Clark County jury convicted Brown in December 2019 of murder with the use of a deadly weapon, robbery with the use of a deadly weapon, and conspiracy to commit robbery in Banks’s death. The Nevada Supreme Court later affirmed the convictions on appeal, leaving in place the verdict that the killing grew out of a robbery plan that ended in gunfire at the apartment complex.
