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LAS VEGAS (AP) — A woman who was shot and killed by Las Vegas police snipers as she opened fire from a cornered stolen car was a parolee who left goodbye notes and invited officers to kill her, a top police official said.
Linda Lush, 50, pointed a handgun at a man in the parking lot before police arrived, and fired three shots out through the windshield of the car as armored police SWAT vehicles moved in Thursday to pin the vehicle in a shopping center parking lot, authorities said.
Lush had yelled, "'Either you can finish this now or I will,'" Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters Tuesday.
Four veteran SWAT officers positioned around the area responded with a total of six shots, hitting Lush five times in the head, neck and arm, McMahill said. No one else was wounded.
Dashboard video from the SWAT vehicles clearly showed shots being fired through the windshield of the stolen car. McMahill said police found an empty bourbon bottle in the vehicle, along with drug paraphernalia and handwritten notes.
One read, "Get all out I won't hurt civilians."
Lush also used the name Delahoussaye, according to court records.
She served 11 years in California prisons on a 1983 assault with a firearm conviction, and another 12 years in Nevada prisons after being convicted in 2002 of kidnapping and robbery in Las Vegas and assault with a deadly weapon in California, McMahill said.
Lush was paroled in June 2014 and tried to kill herself last December in Henderson, he said.
Police and Nevada Parole and Probation officers were looking for Lush last week after she called a parole officer and threatened violence, McMahill said. A plainclothes detective alerted police when he spotted Lush driving a white, four-door vehicle erratically on roads west of downtown.
The SWAT officers — Zachary Adam, Jair Brown, Dewane Ferrin and William Marx — are on paid leave pending departmental and Clark County district attorney reviews of the shooting.
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