Police connected Alonzo Brown to three 2022 homicides after reviewing public video, witness descriptions and earlier case evidence.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Witness descriptions, surveillance footage and police video helped investigators connect Alonzo Brown to three Las Vegas killings before he pleaded guilty and received a 56-years-to-life sentence in Clark County court.
The case turned on more than one crime scene. Police were dealing with separate deaths that unfolded over six months in 2022, including a January shooting outside an apartment complex, a May shooting at a bus stop and a June shooting after a man left a convenience store. Prosecutors later said the evidence showed Brown stalked strangers in public before killing them.
The June killing of Josue Chaparro-Montalvo, 36, gave investigators one of the breaks that moved the case forward. Chaparro-Montalvo had been walking home after visiting a convenience store when he was shot. Witnesses described the suspect, and police compared those details with other material they gathered after a hit-and-run crash involving Brown. When officers reviewed police video from the crash, they noticed clothing that appeared similar to what witnesses had described. That link did not stand alone, but it helped investigators focus on Brown and revisit the earlier shootings with a new suspect in mind.
Surveillance video also played a major role in how prosecutors described the case. During the investigation, police said video appeared to show the suspect watching and following a victim. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Capt. Dori Koren said in 2022 that the footage was disturbing because it made the killing appear random and showed no apparent motive. The same idea returned at sentencing. Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo told the judge that Brown stalked Paul Viana, 62, while Viana waited at a bus stop, then walked up and killed him. DiGiacomo said Brown “just decided he was going to become a serial killer.”
The bus stop shooting happened May 4, 2022. Viana was a stranger to Brown, prosecutors said. His killing fit the pattern that most alarmed police because it happened in an everyday place and involved a victim who was not accused of starting any confrontation. The location was not hidden or remote. It was part of the city’s public life, the kind of place where people wait for transportation. That setting helped show why investigators and prosecutors treated the case as a public threat once they began seeing links between the killings. The absence of a known motive became one of the central facts.
The January killing had different features. Court reporting identified the first victim as Tevin Alhashemi, 26, and said he was shot outside an east Las Vegas apartment complex on Jan. 18, 2022. Prosecutors said Alhashemi and Brown knew each other and had a dispute involving a stolen gun. That gave the first case a possible personal connection. But the later killings of Viana and Chaparro-Montalvo, both described as strangers to Brown, shifted the prosecution’s focus from a single dispute to a pattern of public violence. By the time Brown was charged, police were no longer looking at one homicide in isolation.
Brown denied being the killer after his arrest. In 2022, he said he was not an accused serial killer and described himself as a young man trying to figure out life. He also said an ordinary 18-year-old would not wake up and go on a killing spree. Those remarks came before the case moved through years of court proceedings, including competency issues and later plea negotiations. They remained notable because prosecutors later used direct language to describe the same period. Their account was that Brown was not merely lost or unstable. They said he chose victims, followed them and shot them.
The plea agreement resolved the case without a trial, which means the public did not see a full presentation of all physical evidence before a jury. Still, the record described by prosecutors included surveillance footage, witness accounts and the comparison of clothing after the hit-and-run video. Brown pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. The deal took the death penalty and life without parole out of the case, but it still exposed him to a sentence that would keep him imprisoned for most of his life. Clark County District Court Judge Michelle Leavitt imposed the 56-years-to-life term on April 15.
The sentence set Brown’s parole eligibility in 2078. He received credit for time served, but that did not change the central effect of the punishment. Brown, who was 18 when the killings began and 22 at sentencing, would be in his 70s before he could first ask for parole. Prosecutors had once prepared for a possible capital trial, but the guilty plea ended that path. For families of the victims, the sentence provided a formal answer to a case that began with street shootings and then became a long, closely watched murder prosecution.
The public record still leaves some things unknown. Prosecutors said Brown knew Alhashemi but did not know Viana or Chaparro-Montalvo. Police said they did not find an apparent motive for the stranger killings. No report has given a full public explanation for why the shootings stopped after Brown was identified or whether investigators believe there were other victims. What the court did decide is that Brown admitted killing the three men named in the charges and accepted a life sentence with a minimum term of 56 years.
Brown remains in custody after the sentencing. The investigation that tied the cases together is now part of the court record, and the next fixed milestone is his parole eligibility date in 2078.
Author note: Last updated May 8, 2026.