LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Las Vegas Metro police released a series of body camera videos Thursday, showing their response to the fatal crash involving former Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver Henry Ruggs.
The department posted 10 non-redacted videos. 8 News Now is blurring the videos due to their graphic nature.
Ruggs, 24, pleaded guilty last week to charges of felony DUI resulting in death and a misdemeanor charge of vehicular manslaughter. Ruggs crashed into Tina Tintor, 23, and her dog, Max, when he was speeding on Rainbow Boulevard at 156 mph in November 2021, police said.
The videos posted Thursday do not show any interaction with Ruggs. Ruggs and his girlfriend are seen sitting on a curb.
“Hey, who was in this vehicle?” a Metro police officer yells to a group of witnesses.
“This is Henry Ruggs, he plays for the Raiders,” a witness tells the officer.
As part of the plea agreement, Ruggs could serve anywhere from three to 10 years. He is not eligible for probation or an appeal, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told the 8 News Now Investigators. A judge will have the final say on Ruggs’ sentence on Aug. 9.
Ruggs’ attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, filed a motion to have the blood evidence suppressed in May 2022. A judge denied the request.
Chesnoff and Schonfeld argued Metro police had no probable cause to take a sample of Ruggs’ blood because the Metro officer who called a judge for the warrant, which is standard procedure in DUI cases, did not include reasons why he thought Ruggs was impaired.
Transcripts reveal officers did not mention anything to the judge regarding Ruggs’ intoxication, even though the test would later show he was, in fact, impaired. Instead, the officer tells the judge Ruggs was “driving at a high rate of speed” and was “going in and out of traffic” before the deadly collision.
The officer mentioned his suspicion of DUI, that Ruggs told officers at the hospital “he was on his way home from home” and that his girlfriend told police she was drinking, but there was no mention of hints to impairment, records showed.
“A police officer in good faith who called the judge for the warrant gave very, very few facts to support the probable cause that he was impaired,” Wolfson said.
Without the blood evidence, had it not been entered into evidence at trial, prosecutors would have been left with a reckless driving charge, something that could have left Ruggs with the possibility of just probation, Wolfson said.
“No field sobriety tests were administered the night of the accident because Ruggs was transported to a hospital due to his injuries,” a Metro spokesperson said. “No legal outcome can ever make the Tintor family whole again. But we hope that this brings some level of closure to the family following Tina’s horrific death.”
“No sentence will ever bring Tina and Max back, but we hope that everyone learns from this preventable incident so that no other families suffer like we do,” Tintor’s family said in a statement via their attorney, Farhan Naqvi, last week. “We appreciate the efforts of the district attorney’s office to overcome the issues caused by the initial investigation, and we look forward to putting this behind us so that we can focus on honoring the memories of Tina and Max.”
It is likely Metro will release more videos in the coming days.
