Investigators said Leo’oolo Tevaseu offered several stories before admitting he covered his niece’s mouth, an account that later matched the plea he entered in court.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Prosecutors presented the case against Leo’oolo Tevaseu which turned on his own words as much as on the fatal injuries suffered by his 2-year-old niece, with police records showing a sequence of changing stories that ended in a guilty plea and a 10- to 25-year prison sentence.
That record gave prosecutors a clean narrative without a trial: a babysitting arrangement inside a North Las Vegas apartment, a healthy toddler who stopped breathing, inconsistent explanations to detectives and, finally, an admission that the child’s uncle covered her mouth because she would not stop crying. By January 2026, the case had narrowed to a second-degree murder plea. In March, Judge Tierra Jones accepted the deal and imposed the agreed sentence.
The first account was the broadest and least incriminating. Tevaseu told detectives he was watching his sister’s children while she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles when the little girl suddenly collapsed and would not respond. He said he had not seen her put anything in her mouth and did not know of any medical problem that might explain what happened. That version placed the event in the category of sudden emergency and suggested he was reacting, not causing harm. Police records say he also called the child’s mother with that type of explanation after she had already left the DMV and was heading to a store.
As investigators pressed him, the story changed. Another version described the girl as sick, swaying and then falling. Detectives, according to the charging record, challenged that account because the injuries they were documenting did not line up with a simple fall. Tevaseu then told police he slapped the child’s leg and face and struck her with a pillow, causing her to fall down. Even that did not explain the child’s death. The progression mattered because each shift moved the case farther away from accident and closer to intentional violence. It also gave detectives a reason to keep testing his account against the physical condition of the girl found inside the apartment.
The final account was the one that defined the prosecution. Police said Tevaseu told them the toddler would not stop crying, so he slapped her, hit her with a pillow, picked her up like a baby and placed his hand over her mouth for about 30 seconds until she was “huffing and puffing.” He then said he put her down, realized she was not breathing, tried to give her water and performed CPR for five or 10 minutes before calling the child’s mother. First responders later found the girl without a pulse on a table in the dining room. She was taken to University Medical Center and pronounced dead.
Other statements in the file helped investigators frame the home setting around the death. The child’s mother told police that Fofogafeta Maluia Fields did not have medical issues and had been healthy before the incident. She said Tevaseu, her younger brother, was her primary source of child care while she worked the night shift. She also said he “sometimes gets frustrated with the girls,” according to the police account. That detail did not settle the legal question by itself, but it added context to the frustration Tevaseu described in his own admission and helped explain why police treated the case as homicide.
The legal end of the case followed the logic of those records. Tevaseu, who was 23 by the time of sentencing, pleaded guilty in January 2026 to second-degree murder in the April 2024 killing. The plea agreement called for a term of 10 to 25 years in prison, with published courtroom coverage reporting parole eligibility after 10 years. Jones accepted that arrangement in late March 2026, bringing the criminal proceedings to a close without a public trial. What remains unknown in the public record are the private family discussions and any unfiled arguments that may have shaped the plea negotiations behind the scenes.
The case now stands as a prosecution built from interview rooms, emergency response and a plea agreement rather than from weeks of courtroom testimony. The next visible step, if there is one, would come through an appeal, post-conviction filing or later parole review under the sentence already imposed.
Author note: Last updated April 20, 2026.