KLAS-TV Channel 8 News Las VegasViolent Crime Victim is Still Waiting For Justice
Tracy Hilliard is left wondering why it is taking so long to bring the teen, which police believe is the triggerman, to justice while his accomplice admitted to the crime and is taking a deal with prosecutors.
After a short walk they turned onto a side street where Hilliard first noticed the two men who police later identified as 17-year-old Ryan Royal and his friend, Dimitiri Laine.A grand jury will hear a case involving a local teen accused of shooting a woman while she was walking home from the grocery store.
The shooting happened in the middle of the day in the northwest valley near Lake Mead and Tenaya. The victim in the case gave her only television interview to the Channel 8 I-Team.
She is back at work after she was rushed to University Medical Center with life-threatening injuries six months ago.
But, she says, she is left wondering why it is taking so long to bring the teen, which police believe is the triggerman, to justice while his accomplice admitted to the crime and is taking a deal with prosecutors.
Tracy Hilliard is willing to show the surgical marks on her belly and the bullet wounds on her back. "This is where they cut me during surgery, where they had to fix my colon. Those are entry wounds," she said.
Lifting up your shirt on television is not easy, but Tracy says it serves an important purpose. "And it seems that some of these laws are construed to protect the people who have committed the crimes, and that the people who are victims just have to pick up the pieces and go on," she continued.
It was Thursday, Jun. 15th, around noon. Tracy and her 13-year-old daughter had just stepped off the bus at the stop on Lake Mead and Tenaya.
After a short walk they turned onto a side street where Hilliard first noticed the two men who police later identified as 17-year-old Ryan Royal and his friend, Dimitiri Laine.
"It happened so fast," she said.
As Tracy describes it, she was walking down the side street and looking to the right at her daughter who was walking next to her. That's when, she says, the next thing she knew, out of nowhere, she felt her left arm, the one with her grocery bags and her purse, being violently tugged.
"The kid had my arm pulled up and he had both arms and he had my purse... and he was trying to pull this hand and... there was a gun in his hand. And I guess, for a split second, I thought if I have time to see it than he ain't pullin' the trigger," Tracy described.
But that's when Hilliard thought her daughter was in danger. "I shoved him and he shoved me back. I shoved him a second time and put myself between him and my daughter and that's when I felt -- it felt like a baseball bat hit me on the back. It got real hot," she explained.
Dimitri Laine took a plea deal with prosecutors. He admitted to attempted robbery and attempted murder with a deadly weapon. But even though Laine admitted in the documents that Royal was his accomplice, Laine would not testify against him at the preliminary hearing.
Royal's attorney also argued successfully that the bullets pulled from Hilliard's body had not been properly accounted for, so the judge agreed there was not enough evidence to send Royal to trial.
Hillard said, "I was scared. I was upset that it was dismissed so easily... He's 17, just turned 18 years old, and has no consequences for his actions. And he was going to determine that it was up to him to end somebody's life or to alter somebody's life and he has not even started his yet? That is just incomprehensible to me."
And while Tracy Hilliard is relieved the case against Royal may not be over after all, Royal says nothing can undo what has been done.
"My daughter will for the rest of her life have the image of changing my bandages, my gunshot wounds. What 13-year-old girl should have to change her mother's gunshot wounds 'cause my rib was broken and my stomach was stitched and I couldn't spin around to do it," she added.
District Attorney David Roger says it is not uncommon to send cases to a grand jury even if a Justice Court judge does not find enough evidence to send a case to trial.
Eyewitness News also spoke to Royal's former attorney, Bill Terry.
Terry says he's surprised about the fuss over this case and also says both the judge and the district attorney indicated the case would go to the grand jury at the time the charges were dismissed.
