Former public administrator Robert Telles was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of the murder of Jeff German in 2022.
A Las Vegas politician has been jailed for life for killing an investigative journalist who wrote critical articles detailing irregularities in the department he headed.
Robert Telles, a former Democratic public administrator, lurked outside the suburban home of 69-year-old journalist Jeff German and then stabbed him to death on Sept. 2, 2022.
“Justice has been served,” Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told reporters.
“Today’s verdict should send a message, and that message is a clear one: any attempt to silence the media or to silence or intimidate a journalist will not be tolerated.”
Telles, 47, bowed his head as an official read the verdict of first-degree murder, which carried a possible sentence of life in prison without parole. He was later sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 20 years.
In the public gallery, German's relatives wept and hugged each other. Employees of the Clark County public administrator's office, some of whom had asked German to investigate Telles, hugged and wiped away tears, all of them wearing red T-shirts and badges bearing the journalist's face.
“Jeff was killed for doing the kind of work he took great pride in: his reporting that held an elected official accountable for misconduct and empowered voters to elect someone else to the job,” Glenn Cook, executive editor of German’s newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said in a statement.
“In many countries, journalists’ killers go unpunished,” Cook added. “Not so in Las Vegas.”
DNA testing is “unsurpassed”
The two-week trial described how the veteran Las Vegas Review-Journal journalist had spent months investigating allegations that Telles oversaw an abusive workplace and had an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.
The article was published in June 2022, a month before an election in which Telles was running for a new term. He denied the accusations but lost his re-election bid in the primaries.
The jury, made up of seven women and five men, heard how an angry Telles had driven to German's home, where he hid in some bushes before launching a frenzied and fatal knife attack.
Telles' DNA was found under German's fingernails, and video from the attacker's car matched a vehicle registered to Telles' wife.
He denied carrying out the murder, arguing that police had ignored evidence that others might have been responsible and that he had been framed.
Las Vegas defense attorney Robert Langford, who was not involved in the case, said the DNA evidence under German's fingernails was “an insurmountable piece of evidence.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says 15 media workers have been killed in the United States in connection with their work since 1992.
German was the only journalist killed in the United States in 2022, among the 69 media workers and journalists killed worldwide, according to data from the press group.
“The conviction sends an important message: the killing of journalists will not be tolerated,” said Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ coordinator for the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
