A Nevada high school student allegedly broke into a random home and stabbed a man to death last week before returning to class just hours after the murder, authorities said.
Police said Ethan Goin, 16, randomly stabbed 48-year-old Vergel Guintu in the neck at his home last Friday after the man went to check on a noise that he heard in the house, according to reports.
Guintu’s wife and mother-in-law recounted the grisly scene to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, according to local outlets, telling law enforcement that Guintu went to investigate the sound and was later found in their home in a pool of blood. He had just returned home from dropping the couple’s son at school.
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The Clark County Coroner’s Officer confirmed to The Daily Beast that Guintu had suffered stab wounds to the neck. Additional details about the murder were conveyed through court documents and police records obtained by local outlets.
Guintu’s mother-in-law told officers that after Vergel Guintu went to inspect the first sound, she heard a second one, and moments later an alleged intruder clad in black with a mask and hood passed before her, according to KVVU. She then saw Guintu drenched in blood and his wife, who had been upstairs, immediately called 911, the outlet said.
Police said that emergency personnel who arrived at the scene pronounced Guintu dead at the scene.
According to a declaration of arrest obtained from the Clark County Family and Youth Services, forensic technicians discovered a light-colored hair on Guintu’s wrist during an autopsy, KVVU said, and it was among the clues that led detectives to Goin.
While canvassing the next day, a neighbor reportedly told cops about a suspicious person with blonde hair and dressed in black clothes who was seen in the neighborhood roughly around the time of Guintu’s murder.
Officers then tracked down a suspect later identified as Goin. When they caught up with him, Goin was dressed in black clothing with what appeared to be bloodstains on his boots as he descended into a car toting a black backpack. He later admitted to cops that he planned to dispose of the bloody knife he still had on him, according to KVVU.
According to the outlet, Goin allegedly told detectives that he felt he had been bullied at school and left class not long after the school day began on the day of Guintu’s murder.
Goin recalled jumping a wall into the backyard of a house near his neighborhood and stayed “in the backyard of the house for some time,” but he said much of what happened after he climbed through a window in the house was a “blur,” police reports said, according to KLAS.
Goin also told detectives he had a knife and noticed blood on it when he got home. Not long after returning home, he headed back to class and even saw police moving about the crime scene on his way there, according to KVVU.
The teen allegedly told detectives he realized that he had stabbed someone when he saw news reports about the brutal incident not far from his home, the outlet said.
Goin has been booked in Clark County Juvenile Detention Center and was reportedly denied bail in a Thursday hearing.
