Las Vegas man gets 18 to life for killing a teenage friend

The nearest hospital was six miles away.

Breana Lynn Carasik-McGee, 18, was bleeding to death in the back of his truck from a gunshot wound to the head.

“What lead the defendant to where he is today is the actions he took after that,” prosecutor Erika Wiborg said Tuesday at the sentencing of Ricardo Perez on a second-degree murder charge.

He told police it was an accident. He was drunk and high — off 25 to 30 beers, cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy — after an all-night party in May 2012 at a northeast valley trailer park. The Ruger 9mm handgun he was playing with as they were leaving just went off. He panicked.

He could have driven to another hospital, this one seven miles from the trailer park, “and Breana might be with us today,” Wiborg said.

Instead, Perez drove for 17 miles. He kept driving a mile after the pavement ended in the desert. He told police Carasik-McGee was grunting, and he was “scared and confused.” She considered him a friend.

He put another bullet in her head.

“When it mattered most, arguably the only time it did matter, he made the absolute worst decision possible,” Wiborg said.

Police found her body 20 feet down an embankment of a desert ravine in Henderson, 10 miles from yet a third hospital.

“He had countless opportunities to make a decision that would have possibly lead to Breana sitting here today, but he didn’t take one of those opportunities,” the prosecutor said.

He told friends he wanted to run.

But a day after the shooting, Perez turned himself in at the Clark County Detention Center. He told investigators that after dumping his friend’s body he drove back to his Henderson home, tossed the gun in a dumpster and threw away his bloody clothes.

He said he tried to clean his truck. There was too much blood.

And then he stopped talking. He asked for an attorney, and police ended the interrogation.

Defense lawyer Brent Bryson said Perez had no criminal history. He called the shooting “an aberration.”

Debra Carasik doesn’t believe the story about how her daughter was killed. Why would someone behave the way he did if it was really an accident?

“The only thing Breana did wrong that night was to spend it with you,” Carasik said Tuesday. “No matter what she may have said or done to you, she did not deserve to be shot and killed.”

She begged for the maximum sentence.

Before District Judge Valorie Vega ordered Perez to serve 18 years to life in prison, Carasik pleaded for the truth.

For more than two years, Carasik has kept her only child’s bedroom the way it was the night she didn’t come home. She clings to photos, but the memories bring pain.

Carasik asked Perez to write her while he is in prison and explain what happened, so she could find closure and peace.

“I hope that one day you will do that,” she said, “and that I will be able to forgive you.”

Now 22, Perez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in August, and on Tuesday he apologized to Carasik-McGee’s family.

In the courtroom packed with friends and family of both the victim and defendant, he maintained his story of how the teen died. He said he thinks he made the right decision by telling police his version of events.

“There’s this thing that I really truly believe,” he said. “If you weren’t in my shoes at the time, there’s no way you could decide, or have any say, what you would do at that point in time.”

Contact reporter David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Find him on Twitter: @randompoker