Las Vegas Mother Arrested After I-15 Rollover Kills Her 7-Year-Old Daughter; Police Say She Told Troopers She Used Marijuana the Day Before

The short version: A Las Vegas mother is under arrest after a rollover crash on Interstate 15 killed her 7-year-old daughter. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which reviewed the arrest report, 36-year-old Natalie Rodriguez told troopers she had used marijuana the day before the crash. She agreed to have her blood drawn at the hospital, and the arrest report did not include the blood-test results — which means the central question in the case, what was actually in her system when the vehicle rolled, is still unanswered in the public record.

What the arrest report says

The Review-Journal's account of the arrest report is specific about what Rodriguez told investigators. She said she had used marijuana the day before the crash — not, in her telling, in the hours immediately before she got behind the wheel. At the hospital, she consented to a blood draw, the standard step that allows the state to test for alcohol and drugs after a fatal crash. The arrest report, as the Review-Journal described it, did not include the results of that test. FOX5, reporting on the arrest, described the crash as a rollover on I-15 that killed Rodriguez's daughter; Hoodline, summarizing the charges, put the girl's age at 7. Previously is not naming the child, and the detailed timeline of the drive — where the family was headed, when the vehicle left the roadway and why it rolled — has not been laid out in the reporting available so far.

What is established, and what is not

It is worth being precise about what this case is at this stage. A mother has been arrested, and a 7-year-old is dead after a single-vehicle rollover on the interstate. Police, through the arrest report, say the driver acknowledged marijuana use the previous day. That is an allegation drawn from the driver's own statement as investigators recorded it; it is not a toxicology finding, and it is not a conviction. The blood test Rodriguez consented to is the piece of evidence that will either support or undercut an impairment theory, and until those results are filed, any claim that she was impaired at the moment of the crash goes beyond what the public record supports. Rodriguez is presumed innocent unless and until a court finds otherwise.

Why the blood test matters so much in Nevada

Nevada treats marijuana-impaired driving seriously, and its framework is different from alcohol. With alcohol, the legal limit is familiar and the science of absorption is comparatively straightforward. With marijuana, the state has worked through a per se approach — a defined threshold in the blood — alongside the traditional standard of whether a driver was actually impaired. A statement about use "the day before" sits awkwardly inside that framework: THC can remain detectable after any impairing effect has passed, which is exactly why defense attorneys in cases like this one tend to focus on the timeline and the measured level rather than on the admission alone. Prosecutors, for their part, will pair whatever the lab finds with the crash reconstruction — the physical account of how the vehicle left its lane and rolled — to build the impairment picture they present to a court.

A corridor that keeps producing these stories

Interstate 15 through Las Vegas is one of the busiest and deadliest stretches of road in the valley, carrying local commuters, freight and the weekend traffic between Southern California and Utah. FOX5 noted earlier this fall, in its coverage of a separate fatal I-15 investigation in the Moapa Valley, that Nevada State Police's Southern Command had investigated 49 fatal crashes resulting in 54 deaths so far in 2026. Those numbers are the backdrop every time troopers roll out to another overturned vehicle on this interstate: the valley's fatal-crash total is not an abstraction, it accumulates one family at a time. This case adds a particularly hard version of it — a child passenger, and a driver who will have to answer for the death of her own daughter.

What happens next

The case now moves into the early stages of the Clark County court process: a first appearance, formal charges if prosecutors file them as reported, and the scheduling of preliminary proceedings at which the state would have to show the evidence it intends to rely on. The blood-test results, once filed, will be the document that shapes everything after — the charges that stick, the plea discussions that follow, and the sentence exposure Rodriguez faces. Previously will update this story when the toxicology results and the full charge list are in the public record. For now, the record holds two things at once: a 7-year-old girl is gone, and her mother is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in a Nevada courtroom.

The questions the record does not answer yet

Several basic facts have not been established in the reporting so far: the precise location on I-15 where the vehicle rolled, the time of the crash, whether other vehicles were involved, and what the crash reconstruction shows about speed and lane movement. The reporting also does not yet say what, if anything, investigators found about how the child was restrained. Those gaps matter, because in a single-vehicle fatal rollover the physical evidence — marks on the roadway, the vehicle's condition, the reconstruction team's measurements — usually tells the story that the toxicology then either confirms or complicates. Nevada State Police's major-incident reconstruction process is built for exactly that work, and its findings, like the blood results, will become part of the court file. Until they do, the responsible account of this crash is the narrow one: a rollover on I-15, a dead 7-year-old, an arrested mother, and a laboratory result that has not yet been made public.