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Las Vegas man who found four friends slain in 1998 kills himself
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Justin Perkins' suicide note said he just couldn't live with the haunting images any longer.
"'Don't feel bad, it's not your fault,"' his father, Rex Perkins said, paraphrasing the note left by his 28-year-old son. "'The boys keep calling me to heaven."'
Justin Perkins shot himself dead Nov. 2, some eight years, after discovering four friends shot dead in a house in Las Vegas.
"He'd said he was seeing the boys in his dreams," Rex Perkins told the Las Vegas Review-Journal for a Tuesday report.
Justin Perkins was close friends with Matthew Mowen, 19, Jeffrey Biddle, 19, Tracey Gorringe, 20 and Peter Talamantez, 17. They were found bound with duct tape and shot in the head following an Aug. 14, 1998, home invasion robbery.
Their killer, Donte Johnson, 27, is awaiting execution on Nevada's death row. Accomplices Terrell Young and Sikia Smith, both 27, are serving life prison sentences.
Authorities say Johnson, Young and Smith went to the house looking for money or drugs before Johnson shot Mowen, Biddle, Gorringe and Talamantez. The robbery netted $240, a Sony Playstation, a pager and a videocassette recorder.
David Mowen, father of Matt Mowen, said he came to know Justin Perkins as a compassionate man who spent eight years pained by the tragedy.
Perkins had been at the house on Terra Linda Avenue several hours before the slayings. He went home early because he wasn't feeling well.
The next day, he returned to find the front door slightly open. He got a glimpse of the bodies and ran to a neighbor's home to summon police. Mowen met Justin Perkins outside the house.
"We were meeting each other for the first time on what was the worst day in both of our lives, and the way he handled himself was remarkable," Mowen recalled. "I was very proud of him. We all have lived this nightmare, and you can really only understand it if you've lived it."
Rex Perkins said his son missed his friends intensely. He had a T-shirt honoring their memory, and their pictures on his wall. He named his daughter, Tracey, after Gorringe.
"Justin always felt that under other circumstances, he would have been in the house," said Clark County prosecutor Dave Stanton. "He had almost a survivor's guilt."
Court cases against Johnson, Smith and Young lasted eight years.
Johnson's first conviction and death sentence was overturned because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. A second trial last year resulted in another death sentence.
Young was tried twice, after the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that a judge should have let Young change his court-appointed lawyers in his first trial. Young was convicted again and sentenced again to life in prison.
Justin Perkins testified at least six times in court. He talked of how he dreaded reliving the tragedy time after time. But Rex Perkins said his son would not seek counseling.
"He said, 'Dad I'm OK. I'm OK,"' Rex Perkins recalled.
Justin Perkins worked at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. He cut his long hair so that it could be used to make wigs for cancer victims. He donated blood.
The night he died, he did his laundry.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Robert Daskas, called the suicide heartbreaking.
"This is one of the ripple effects of murder," Daskas told the Review-Journal. "Murder just doesn't affect the immediate victims. It affects family and friends for years and years."
 
"The day will come when my body will lie upon a white sheet neatly tucked under four corners of a mattress located in a hospital; busily occupied with the living and the dying. At a certain moment a doctor will determine that my brain has ceased to function and that, for all intents and purposes, my life has stopped.
When that happens, do not attempt to instill artificial life into my body by the use of a machine. And don't call this my deathbed. Let it be called the bed of life, and let my body be taken from it to help others lead fuller lives.
Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face or love in the eyes of a woman.
Give my heart to a person whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain.
Give my blood to the teenager who was pulled from the wreckage of his car, so that he might live to see his grandchildren play.
Give my kidneys to the one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week.
Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.
Explore every corner of my brain.
Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that, someday a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against her window.
Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.
If you must bury something, let it be my faults, my weakness and all prejudice against my fellow man.
Give my sins to the devil.
Give my soul to God.
If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all I have asked, I will live forever. "
Robert N. Test
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