The 42-year-old bomb builder is been wanted by authorities after he escaped from a Nevada jail where he was doing time serving a life term for a fatal explosion that occurred outside a Las Vegas Strip resort in 2007.
After learning that the escapee had been gone from the medium-security prison since early in the weekend, Gov. Steve Sisolak announced late on Tuesday that his office had launched an investigation into the matter.
Sisolak issued a statement saying, “This is intolerable.”
Authorities didn’t discover Porfirio Duarte-Herrera was gone until Tuesday morning during a head count at Southern Desert Correctional Center outside Las Vegas. Search teams were seeking him, according to a statement from the state Department of Corrections.
The murder of a hot dog stand vendor by Duarte-Herrera, a Nicaraguan, who placed a motion-activated explosive in a coffee cup on top of a parked automobile at the Luxor hotel-casino, was found guilty in 2010.
According to records, Omar Rueda-Denvers, his co-defendant, was still in detention on Tuesday. The 47-year-old Guatemalan is currently incarcerated for life at a different facility in Nevada on charges of murder, attempted murder, explosives, and other offenses.
Prosecutors identified Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio as the ex-boyfriend of Rueda-Denvers, and a Clark County District Court jury spared both men from the death penalty.
Jealousy, according to the prosecution, was the driving force for the assault on a two-story parking structure’s top deck of a parking garage with two stories. Initial worries about a terrorist strike in the Strip were sparked by the explosion.
Duarte-Herrera was described by authorities as being 135 pounds, 5 feet, 4 inches tall, with brown eyes and brown hair.
Corrections officers are to “investigate and conclude a thorough inquiry into this event as swiftly as possible,” according to Sisolak, who also claimed that his office had issued the order.
