Briana Erickson, an investigative reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, celebrated her 28th birthday on Friday with, as one does on Labor Day Weekend, an out-of-town getaway. She did not expect to hear the next day that a colleague had been found dead.
She did not expect the follow-up news on Sunday to be even worse: that he was killed.
The cascade of horrible developments in the aftermath of Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German’s murder reached a pinnacle on Wednesday evening after Robert Telles, an elected official in Clark County, Nevada, was arrested at his home. The coverage of the pursuit was led by Review-Journal reporters, who have finally gotten the chance to grieve the colleague they lost.
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“We’re just acting on instinct right now, aggressively trying to find out what happened,” Erickson told The Daily Beast in a phone call from the Review-Journal’s newsroom. “We’ve finally been able to breathe.”
“We’re here to break news, get it right, because that’s what Jeff would want us to do,” said Michael Scott Davidson, 31, another member of German’s five-person team.
The paper was the first to report German’s murder late Saturday night, a story that cited a stabbing over an unspecified “altercation.” Erickson said the paper had just been informed that German was found dead outside his home, but once her editor Rhonda Prast saw a press release regarding a homicide at a certain address, Prast connected the dots.
“She just said, ‘That’s Jeff’s address,’” Erickson said. “I had already been asleep at that time, it was pretty late. So I woke up to the news, actually, that he was killed.”
Erickson drove the six hours back to Vegas from Utah, where she took the time to listen to the eight-episode second season of Mobbed Up, a podcast series German hosted. Hearing his voice made her feel better, she said, because she knew how proud he was of his work. “It kind of culminated his legacy,” she said.
It also allowed her to process the horrible news she received. “It was just, kind of, like, a WTF moment,” she said. “Just really just thinking about Jeff and, you know, who would have done this? What could explain this?”
As police released details of the subject on Tuesday—a man dressed in a straw hat, gloves, and an orange shirt, along with a 2007 to 2017 red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali with chrome handles and a sunroof—she began to speculate about what could have happened, including whether someone killed him while trying to commit a crime or whether it was, indeed, retaliation. “But you know, the mob stuff was from decades ago, and that just wasn’t really plausible,” she said.
Some of her colleagues focused on some odd, angry, and often spiteful tweets directed at German by one man: Telles, a 45-year-old Democrat who serves as Clark County’s public administrator. It wasn’t out of the norm for journalists to receive threats over their work, Erickson said, pointing to voicemails that she said were worse than what Telles tweeted at German.
But the attacks led reporters and editors to search Telles’ address on Google Maps, where they found a photo of the vehicle that matched the police description in his driveway.
It was that revelation that led editors to assign reporters to stake out the house, hoping to get a glimpse of the car to confirm it. Reporters then drove past Telles’ house, where they captured photos of Telles washing his car just hours after police described the car. Police later carried out a search warrant on Telles’ home the next morning while he wasn’t home, and Telles’ car was towed just before 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Still, Review-Journal reporters continued doing their job. Erickson spoke to Telles’ employees about what could lead Telles to such a violent act while breaking news reporter Brett Clarkson and photographer Kevin Cannon staked out Telles’ home, which police returned to that night to arrest him.
That process wasn’t easy. An hour-long standoff ensued as police tried to get Telles to come out of his home, eventually calling medical services to the scene and clearing out the neighborhood. It left Erickson and her colleagues with both shock and fear, one reminiscent of the anxiety felt while covering the 2017 mass shooting at a Vegas music festival.
“I just was thinking, ‘Is this person going to harm themselves, and are we not going to have justice for Jeff?’” she said. “Of course, he’s innocent until proven guilty. But, you know, the behavior’s just very alarming.”
Telles was eventually arrested Wednesday night when he was carried out into an ambulance outside his home. It’s allowed the newsroom to finally start the grieving process, including counseling sessions, for the Vegas “institution” that was German.
“Jeff was so good at what he did, but he came in here every day like he was still trying to earn his stripes,” Davidson said. “He just came in and did the job. Like he was still trying to prove himself. And it showed in his work.”
The two described German as a serious, devoted journalist who found his fun through a love of football—a football was placed on his desk in memorial and his favorite teams were the Milwaukee Bucks and the Green Bay Packers—and the occasional riff on his own stories on Twitter, with tweets that would read similarly to a New York Daily News or New York Post headline.
“He comes up with these funny, almost pseudo-like tabloid headlines even though his work is so traditional newspaper, well-reported-out—not salacious like tabloid salacious, but just hard-hitting stuff,” Davidson said with a laugh. “But those tweets are just, I don’t know— it’s just always fun. I’d always look forward to see how he would like present that.”
But German’s work was always dogged, the two said. It’s made them even more headstrong in their profession, even when the risks of pursuing it have been amplified in such a personal way. “I just can’t fathom that we live in a country where we now have to look over our shoulders for expressing our rights guaranteed to us in the First Amendment?” Erickson said.
“Any one of us would have reported this story. Any one of us could have, meaning any story that you pursue could potentially lead to circumstances that are completely unforeseen while you’re reporting it,” she added. “So I guess it’s just kind of puts me on alert, puts all of us on alert here that this is a possibility, which truthfully has never really crossed my mind before.”
