911 Call Captures What Las Vegas Man Told Dispatcher After Shooting His Parents Near UNLV

The short version: On the morning of September 16, a 40-year-old Las Vegas man called 911 from an apartment near UNLV and told the dispatcher he had shot his parents. Moments later, another gunshot rang out on the open line — then silence. When Las Vegas police arrived at the 1600 block of East Rochelle Avenue, they found three people with gunshot wounds: Jimea Mahmoud, 64, and Ibrahim Jihar, 69, dead at the scene, and their son, Abdelhafiz Abdelgader, dying from a self-inflicted wound. The Clark County coroner ruled the parents' deaths homicides and the son's death a suicide. Now, details of that 911 call — the shooter's own voice in his final minutes — have been made public, giving investigators and the public the clearest window yet into how a family argument became a murder-suicide.

The call is the centerpiece of the case. According to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Homicide Lt. Robert Price, Abdelgader dialed 911 himself shortly before 10 a.m. and told the dispatcher, in plain terms, that he had shot his parents. What the dispatcher heard next needs no interpretation: a second gunshot, and then nothing. Officers were already rolling to the apartment complex near Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway, a dense residential corridor just east of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, where apartment blocks sit shoulder to shoulder with small businesses and the traffic never fully stops.

What they found inside told the rest of the story. Two people — Mahmoud and Jihar — were dead where they fell. A third man was alive but gravely wounded; paramedics rushed him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The coroner's office later determined that all three died of multiple gunshot wounds. For the parents, the manner of death was homicide. For the son, it was suicide.

The 911 recording matters because it answers the question every murder-suicide leaves behind: what happened in the final minutes, and in what order? In this case, the sequence is unusually clear. The shooter himself summoned help — or at least summoned witnesses — then ended his own life while the line was still open. Police have not described a motive, and nothing in the public record so far explains what drove a 40-year-old man to turn a gun on the two people who raised him. The Review-Journal's reporting on the call notes that it sheds light on Abdelgader's mental state in those last minutes, but investigators have stopped short of offering a diagnosis or a reason. Sometimes the clearest evidence still leaves the central question unanswered.

Neighbors described a morning that went from ordinary to unthinkable in minutes. People living in the complex told reporters they heard yelling and screaming before patrol cars began pouring into the parking lot. One woman in an adjacent unit said she never heard gunfire at all — only a loud thud, the kind of sound you notice and then dismiss until you step outside and see officers sprinting toward the building. By the time the crime-scene tape went up, the apartment block had become the latest Las Vegas address attached to a sentence nobody wants to read: a family dispute turned deadly.

Police have said little beyond the essentials, which is standard in a case with no surviving suspect and no one to charge. There were no reports of prior calls for service at the apartment that have been made public, no history of domestic disturbances on the record, no warning that neighbors or relatives have described to reporters. The known facts begin with the 911 call and end with the coroner's rulings. Everything between the dial tone and the silence is still being reconstructed from that recording.

The location itself is part of the story. The 1600 block of East Rochelle Avenue sits in the heart of the central valley, a few minutes from the UNLV campus, in a neighborhood of garden-style apartment complexes where thousands of people live within earshot of one another. It is the kind of place where a loud argument at 9:45 in the morning gets noticed — and where, on this particular morning, it was.

Cases like this one follow a grim pattern that homicide detectives know well: the perpetrator calls for help, or calls to confess, and the call becomes both the first report and the last word. Lt. Price's account — that Abdelgader told the dispatcher what he had done, and that a final gunshot followed — fits that pattern exactly. What the newly public details add is texture: the sound of a man narrating his own crime as it concluded, with a dispatcher on the line who could do nothing but listen and send help that arrived too late.

For the family left behind, the public record now holds three names, an address, a time of day, and a phone call. Jimea Mahmoud, 64. Ibrahim Jihar, 69. Abdelhafiz Abdelgader, 40. The coroner's office has spoken. The police have described what they can. And the 911 call — the shooter's own account, delivered in real time — remains the closest thing to an explanation anyone is likely to get.

The investigation, as Metro typically frames it in murder-suicide cases, is a matter of documentation rather than pursuit: confirming the sequence, ruling out other participants, and closing the file. No motive has been announced, and in cases like this one, none may ever be. What is certain is that on a September morning in central Las Vegas, a son called 911, said what he had done, and then made sure there would be no one left to answer for it.

Previously's Las Vegas desk continues to follow this story. Read our earlier reporting on a Metro investigation in the valley.