Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Daniel Mendoza - Part 5

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

With the conviction of Ron Mortensen, our attention turns to Christoper Brady. Was this a case of the prosecutors and police having preconceived notions of Mortensen's guilt and ignoring Brady? What exactly was the jury not allowed to hear?https://sinspod.co/134https://sinspod.co/134transcripthttps://sinspod.co/134blogBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sins-survivors-a-las-vegas-true-crime-podcast--6173686/support.Domestic Violence Resourceshttp://sinspod.co/resourcesClick here to become a member of our Patreon!https://sinspod.co/patreonVisit and join our Patreon now and access our ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content & schwag! Get ad-free access for only $1 a month or ad-free and bonus episodes for $3 a monthApple Podcast Subscriptionshttps://sinspod.co/appleWe're now offering premium membership benefits on Apple Podcast Subscriptions! On your mobile deviceLet us know what you think about the episodehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/2248640/open_sms

To listen ad-free, visit sinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show. By the end of Ron Mortensen's trial, one former Metro officer had been convicted of murdering Daniel Mendoza. But for Daniel's family, for his neighborhood, for activists and the many people with eyes on Las Vegas Metro, the verdict did not answer everything. Even as Mortensen's legal fate seemed sealed, more questions were already rising to the surface. Christopher Brady's own conduct, his history and the allegations that followed him, would keep raising doubts and forcing people to ask, how much did the jury never get to hear? Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on missing persons, unsolved cases, and cases involving domestic violence, which is the number one cause of homicide in the Las Vegas area.

I'm your host Sean and I'm your co-host John for the past month we have been covering the murder of Daniel Mendoza a 21 year old who was shot and killed in front of his home when two off-duty police officers Ron Mortensen and Christopher Brady drove by his house and one of the officers fired a gun at Daniel and his friends if you have not listened to parts one through four yet we strongly recommend going back and starting there as we are now deep into the trial the verdict and the aftermath you can visit sinspod.com 29 to start with part one to get caught up. When we left off in part four, Ron Mortensen was on trial for Daniel's murder, with Christopher Brady acting as a key witness for the prosecution. For weeks, the city was holding its breath, fearing the worst if Mortensen was found not guilty,

expecting protests and riots to break out amidst rising concerns over over-policing and racism. The injustice of Daniel's murder was undeniable, an unarmed 21-year-old celebrating the holidays with friends was purposely shot down by drunk off-duty cops who came into his neighborhood solely to harass working-class people and minorities. Metro, the community, and even the trial judge were rumored to be concerned about what could happen if Mortensen walked free. Many people believe the case came down to credibility. Christopher Brady took the stand and testified that Mortensen fired the shots that killed Daniel. Mortensen took the stand in his own defense and testified that Brady was the real shooter. The jury saw the truck Brady drove that night, heard about the ballistic evidence and the

competing versions of what happened, and ultimately found Mortensen guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon. The day immediately after their verdict was entered, those same jurors had to decide whether Mortensen would someday have a chance at parole. During the penalty phase, prosecutor William Coote asked jurors to think beyond Mortensen himself. He told them to consider the damage Mortensen had done, not only to Daniel's family but to the community, to the police department, and to the fragile trust between officers and the neighborhoods they're supposed to serve. The review journal highlighted one of his lines in large type in their article about the sentencing. Consider the residual damage done by Ronald Mortensen. If Mr. Mortensen has to be made an object lesson,

then so be it. And after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with the harshest sentence available, life in prison without the possibility of parole. The review journal described Daniel's father, Ramon Mendoza, his brother Ivan, and his grandmother Maria reacting in court. The paper reported that Ramon said the exact sentence Mortensen received was of little interest to him because no prison term could help his grieving family. Whether Mortensen could be parole, or would remain in prison for the rest of his life, Daniel was still gone. The front page of the next morning's paper revealed a complicated story that went beyond just one man being sentenced for murder. On one side of the page was Mortensen, convicted and being led away

in handcuffs to spend the rest of his life in prison. On the other was Christopher Brady. The officer who had driven the truck, left McKellar's circle, kept control of the murder weapon for nearly two days and testified for the state. The article directly under Brady's name was not about Daniel Mendoza's murder directly. It called Brady's background and credibility into question. The reporting echoed the concerns of many people in Daniel's neighborhood and among civil rights leaders. The case still had a hole in its center. For a lot of people, the Brady question had not been resolved at all. And even broader than that, almost immediately after Mortensen's conviction, lawmakers and activists were talking about civilian oversight.

of Metro. One review journal headline put it plainly, police control debated. State Senator Joe Neal argued that the Mortensen case showed someone objective should be watching over the police to make sure they weed out the bad cops before somebody else gets killed. Metro officials pushed back on the idea that a civilian review board would necessarily have prevented Daniel's murder, but they also said that they were beginning to screen recruits more carefully. The public was asking how two officers, who admitted they were driving around harassing people while off duty, had been allowed to be cops in the first place. That brings us back to Christopher Brady.

By the end of the trial, the jury had heard Brady's version of Daniel's shooting, but it had not heard everything that would later surround him. Some of that was because of ordinary rules of evidence. A jury is not supposed to hear every bad thing a witness has allegedly done, especially if the allegation is unproven, unrelated, or likely to distract from the facts the jury is supposed to decide on. We've talked many times about this on the podcast when we've talked about prior bad acts. The fact that the jury did not hear something does not automatically mean that something improper happened, but that's always hard to reconcile when you're

talking about justice. In this case, the gap between the way the prosecution presented Brady to the jury as the man who had essentially solved the case for Metro and the record that emerged around him afterward became a major issue for Mortensen's supporters and the community at large. From earlier episodes, you'll likely recall that even though Brady was the witness for the state, his hands were not clean, given what he testified to under oath. He admitted to drunk driving, that he and Mortensen went into lower-income neighborhoods, looking to harass people. He called those people that he targeted dopers, bangers, and screwball people. He described driving recklessly, accelerating doing 180s, cutting through alleys, and generally messing around.

He told the jury that they thought they could get away with harassing people in those neighborhoods because they were nasty people. His testimony seemed to indicate that this wasn't a one-time drunken trip, but something he and other officers did often. Brady admitted to driving away from the scene, when it was unknown if anyone was hurt, that he handled and cleaned the weapon used in the shooting, and that he waited two days to go to his supervisor to report. what had happened. From the state's point of view, they needed him because he was the only person

who could testify about what happened inside the truck and back up their theory of the case. But every time Brady explained why he and Mortensen were there, he reminded the jury that he was not just an innocent bystander. Later testimony showed that detectives initially wanted to do what was called a walk-through booking of Brady for a possible accessory charge, and that never happened. Command staff decided the matter should go to the district attorney because Brady had come in voluntarily and because by then he was being treated as essentially a witness for the state. That one decision shaped everything that followed and the decision of whether Brady should have been treated as a suspect, an accessory, or something more serious never really went away. We're going to pause here for a quick break,

but when we come back, we're going to dive into the incidents from Brady's past that the jury never got to hear. The first category of information, the jury did not fully hear, involved Brady's internal affairs history with Metro. After the trial, the review journal published an article under the headline, Brady no stranger to complaints. According to that reporting, police internal affairs complaints against Brady showed he had been accused of roughing up one Latino man, inappropriately pointing a gun at another, and unnecessarily handcuffing several other people. The article said most of the eight complaints against Brady, which had been filed over a three-month period in 1995, involved neglect of duty, failure to follow policy, and general rudeness to members of the public. Only three of the eight complaints were substantiated by the investigators.

We will note that a complaint is not the same thing as a sustained finding, but the overall picture was still troubling, especially because Brady was early in his career when this all happened. one of the complaints involved an incident at the Stardust Hotel, where a witness said Brady and another officer were removing an unruly man from the property. According to the internal affairs information quoted by the newspaper, the witness said one officer threw the man toward a patrol car where he hit his head and then fell to the ground. The report noted that no one noticed injuries when the man was booked and he could not later be found for questioning, so the excessive force complaint could not be upheld. In other complaints, cab drivers alleged Brady was overbearing and rude while removing and handcuffing them after minor traffic violations. In one of those incidents, the citations included reckless driving and excessive use of a horn. In another complaint, a motorist named Louis Nogali said Brady unjustifiably pointed a loaded gun at him. Brady was cited for violating policy and not using sound judgment and for failing to complete reports on the incident.

The paper also reported on a complaint involving a motorist named Jorge Escobar, who said an officer pointed a gun at his head for no reason. Authorities concluded Escobar was referring to Brady, but following an investigation, the complaint remained unsubstantiated. Again, we note that it's important to consider that some complaints were sustained, while some were not, and some were later described by Metro officials as the kinds of complaints that were related to professionalism, but not necessarily the kinds of complaints that usually lead to termination. Under Sheriff, Richard Winget, said that the department safeguards had alerted administrators to a large number of complaints against Brady early in his career, and that disciplinary action

had followed, including written reprimands and increased training. But for anyone looking at Brady's credibility after Daniel's murder, the real issue was whether the jury had been allowed to see the broader pattern that was central to Mortensen's defense arguments. Defense attorney Frank Kremlin had tried to present some of Brady's internal affairs history to the jury. Judge Joseph Pavlocowski did not allow it. As we mentioned earlier, that kind of ruling is not unusual, though. Judges routinely limit evidence if they believe it's unrelated, prejudicial, or not sufficiently connected to the facts of the case, or if they will likely distract the jury. Brady's complaints, at least as Metro-framed them, involved rudeness, poor judgment,

and internal policy violations, none of which were necessarily evidence that he had killed Daniel Mendoza or that he was lying. However, to Mortensen and his defense team, the complaints mattered because Brady's credibility was the case. The state was asking jurors to believe Brady when he said that he had only drawn his gun when he thought Mortensen saw a threat and that he had not fired his gun. The defense wanted to show that Brady had a history of aggressive or improper policing and that this history made his version of the night much harder to accept. Then there were allegations involving Brady and Mortensen's history working together as partners. We touched on some of this earlier in the series, but we want to revisit these incidents so that our listeners have the

complete picture of Christopher Brady that the jury did not necessarily get. Brady and Mortensen had worked together for about six months before Janiel was killed, and during that period, there were already complaints about the way they treated people in the neighborhoods they patrolled. One incident involved an 18-year-old named Raul Luis Mosqueda. According to later reporting and court records, we reviewed, Mosqueda was arrested for possession of a pair of scissors and being under the influence of a controlled substance. He ended up in the hospital because of injuries he sustained during the arrest, and the hospital staff were directed to restrain him and pump his stomach because the officer suspected an overdose. Nothing was found in his system, and the district

attorney later dropped the charges for lack of evidence. Another incident involves Sergio Acosta. According to Acosta's later lawsuit in early December 1996, just a few weeks before David Mendoza was killed, Brady and Mortensen were involved in a stop where Brady allegedly kicked and choked Acosta, while Mortensen allegedly held a gun to the head of Acosta's friend. Acosta was arrested on a charge of being under the influence of cocaine and forced to submit to a urine test, which came back negative. Despite that negative test, Acosta said he was held in a North Las Vegas jail until December 17th. He said he lost his job at Bally's because of the charges he faced. Those allegations were not the same as proof in Daniel's murder case, but they raised a disturbing question.

If Brady and Mortensen were already drawing complaints about aggressive conduct, why were they still working together? And why did no one intervene before McKellar Circle? There was also the alleged culture behind some of these encounters. In earlier episodes, we talked about the term fishing, which surfaced in connection with the civil litigation around the case. According to later testimony, the term referred to off-duty police officers getting drunk, driving into minority neighborhoods, and finding people they viewed as gang members or criminals and provoking confrontations for fun. Former Sergeant Ron Fox described it as bar room talk that he said he had often heard rumors. about. The federal lawsuit alleged that senior officials within Metro knew this kind of behavior was

happening, and they looked the other way. Allegations about a culture are not the same thing as proof about any one officer on any one night. However, Brady himself admitted to this conduct of fishing in Daniel's case. He admitted that he and Mortensen were drunk. They were off duty. They were driving around. They were harassing people in neighborhoods where they thought they could get away with it. So even if the jury did not hear every complaint, every allegation, or every civil rights claim, the pattern was becoming visible. Brady was not just a reluctant witness who happened to do the right thing by coming forward. He was an officer who admitted that he had participated in the harassment that led to Daniel's death. He had his own internal affairs history, and his partnership with Mortensen had already generated serious complaints.

He was an officer whose role in the homicide investigation had been treated very differently from Mortensen's. That doesn't prove that Brady fired the gun. It does not undo the eyewitness testimony or erase the ballistics evidence, but it does explain why so many people kept asking whether the state star witness had been examined with the same skepticism that any ordinary suspect would have faced. The day after Mortensen was sentenced to life without parole, the review journal ran another story about Brady. The headline said Mortensen had been present at a Brady traffic stop, and that police might be asked to reopen a sexual assault probe involving Brady. The allegation came from Carrie Morris, a 26-year-old Las Vegas woman, who said Brady had coerced her into a sexual act during a traffic stop. According to the reporting, Morris said she'd been stopped on Wind Road in October of 1996, about two months before Daniel Mendoza was killed. She said Brady called Mortensen to the scene, searched her car, and then told her she had an outstanding traffic warrant and would be taken to jail. Morris alleged that while she was being taken to jail, Brady stopped in a vacant alley and forced her to perform a sex act. She also alleged that Brady threatened to plant drugs on her if she reported what had happened. Brady denied the allegations. His attorney said the claims were false, publicity driven, and motivated by resentment toward law enforcement. Police had previously investigated Morin's. Police had previously investigated Morin's.

his complaint and said they did not have enough evidence to support criminal charges. After the Mortensen verdict, Morris and her attorney, Andrew Myers, asked Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell to take another look. Bell said that since they had a victim who wanted to proceed, prosecutors would meet with Metro and decide what they could prove and what they could not prove. Metro said it would honor the request to reopen communications about the issue. So in the days immediately after Mortensen was convicted and sentenced, the public was seeing a new version of Christopher Brady, not only as the witness who helped convict Mortensen, but as the former officer at the center of another serious allegation. I want to note that Morris's allegation did not result in a criminal

conviction. The district attorney ultimately declined to prosecute Brady, saying that there was not enough evidence to successfully pursue charges. In a later decision, Bell reportedly concluded that something improper may have happened, but that the evidence was not strong enough to prove a criminal case beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a narrow legal conclusion. This allegation continued to matter for two important reasons. One, the more obvious one, is because that it went directly to the question of Brady's credibility, his use of authority, and what the jury in the Mortons in trial didn't hear. But even more important was what Morris told authorities that Brady had said during the incident.

As a reminder, during the trial on Daniel's murder, Mortensen testified that after the shooting, when he asked Brady why he had fired the gun, Brady told him, I told you I was evil, man, I'm evil. According to later reporting, Morris said that when she asked Brady why he had assaulted her, he said, some people call me evil, and then laughing said something like, sometimes I call myself evil, man, I am evil. Her attorney also said that a therapist who counseled Morris was willing to testify that Morris had described Brady using that language before Mortensen took the stand, which would show that Carrie wasn't making up that part after she knew about Morton's testimony about what Brady said after the murder. That phrase, I am evil, became one of the key pieces of Mortensen's post-trial motions.

His defense attorney later argued that if jurors had known that another person had independently described Brady, using that same evil language, it could have affected how they evaluated Mortensen's testimony. The state argued that Morris's allegation had serious credibility problems, that the evil statement did not prove who fired the gun on McKellar's circle, and that the evidence was not enough to justify a new trial. The court agreed with the state, and Mortensen was not granted a new trial, but from the perspective of the people who never accepted the clean version of Brady's role, the statement was hard to ignore, and much more than a coincidence. That line, which was one of the most theatrical parts of Mortensen's testimony, feels much more likely to have been something that Brady actually said.

The sexual assault allegation also created another layer of problems for Metro. Morris's attorney, Andrew Myers, was openly skeptical that Las Vegas police could investigate one of their own. In one article, he said that he did not feel that Metro could investigate itself properly and describe the situation as oppression under the color of law. Soon after, the case began to move beyond Metro Internal Affairs and local prosecution. The FBI opened a civil rights inquiry into Christopher Brady, and on November 7, 1997, a federal grand jury convened to look into his role during the shooting on McKellar's circle and the larger pattern of his alleged behavior. It's clear that his conduct that night was much larger than just a question for Metro's internal processes.

We are going to pause here for our last break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about one final Brady accusation that would continue to haunt the case for decades. The final issue regarding Brady that we wanted to share is the one most directly connected to the night Daniel was killed. During Mortensen's trial, you might recall that his attorney, Frank Kremlin, said that he received an anonymous call, claiming that Brady had previously talked to another metro officer, Mark Barry, about wanting to do a drive-by shooting. At the time, a prosecutor told the court that an investigator had spoken with Barry and that the claim was nonsense, so the jury never heard from him. But a year later, in 1998, Barry testified before the federal grand jury, and his account was not, as the state had called it, nonsense. Mark Berry said

that Brady had mentioned doing a drive-by several times. He said he had not taken the comments seriously at the time because they had been drinking and blowing off steam and because the comments sounded like a joke. Barry also said that when the shooting on McKellar Circle happened, those comments came back to him. He testified that after hearing about Daniel's death, he started thinking that maybe Brady had been serious. He used the phrase that he put two and two together. When asked how many times Brady had talked about drive-bys, Barry could not give an exact number, but he agreed that a few times would be fair, and at one point, half a dozen was suggested as a safe estimate. This was critical, because it was not simply another allegation that Brady had been rude, aggressive, or careless.

Brady had testified that the harassment on December 27th was basically a spontaneous idea, something that just dawned on him that night. But Barry's later testimony, if credible, suggested Brady had talked about drive-by violence before on several occasions. If believed, Barry's account went directly to the theory that Brady had talked before Daniel's murder about the very kind of violence that occurred on McKellar Circle, and certainly a jury may have doubted his story if they had heard that from Barry. Shockingly, despite what was presented at the murder trial, Barry testified to the federal grand jury that homicide detectives never came to talk to him. He said two people contacted him by phone during the trial, but he didn't know who they were, and because it involved a murder case, he wasn't willing to explain everything over the phone to strangers.

He expected to be subpoenaed, and he said that he was prepared to say what he knew, but no subpoena came. The state's position then and later was that Barry's testimony did not prove Brady would. was the shooter and would not have changed the result of the trial. On October 9, 1998, the state district court held an evidentiary hearing on Mortensen's motion for new trial, but determined that Barry's statements were insufficient to justify that request. Unsurprisingly, the Barry issue did not disappear. It became one of the key pieces of evidence Mortensen would keep returning to in his appeals decades later. We're going to get into those details in a later episode. It's no wonder. that by the end of 1997, the public debate over whether Metro could be trusted to police itself

was reaching a fever pitch in Las Vegas as the deeper inquiry into Brady's actions, alleged abuses of power, and whether he had violated the rights of the people he was sworn to protect grew. On August 20th, 1999, Christopher Brady pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of Hispanic people. According to the reporting and case materials, he took the plea to avoid what was described as an inevitable indictment. and the possibility of a life sentence. He was sentenced to nine years in federal prison, and in early 2000, he surrendered at a federal prison in Minnesota. For Daniel's father, Ramon Mendoza, Brady's federal case brought something that sounded like acceptance. Ramon told the federal court during the sentencing, I don't know why there are so many people with such bad feelings.

The decision that you make, I will respect. I have no anger against the person who did what he did to my son because I leave it all in God's hands. And then he said something even simpler and maybe even sadder to the press. To a certain point, I think it's justice, but either way, my son isn't here anymore. Brady's father, Mike Brady, saw it very differently. He told reporters, Chris essentially solved the case for them and it's been downhill for him since then. In Mike Brady's view, his son had come forward, turned in the gun, and helped prosecutors prove the case against Mortensen. However, for people who had questioned Brady's treatment by Metro from the beginning, that version of the story skipped over the part that had always bothered them.

Brady was never just an outside witness. At Brady's federal sentencing hearing, Mortensen's father Larry and Mortensen's then-wife Zoe were also present. Larry told the press that Brady's plea meant that Ron should get a new trial, and he said he would keep trying to prove that Brady, not his son, had killed Daniel. That argument would become the center of the next chapter. Mortensen's appeals, his motion for a new trial, and his attempts to use the evidence of Brady's misconduct would continue for years. In July of 1999, Mortensen wrote to review journal columnist John L. Smith defending his innocence. In that letter, he claimed, among other things, that one of Daniel's own friends or fellow gang members had actually shot him,

and that Brady and Mortensen had taken the fall. Smith's response was cutting. He wrote, It turns out that Mortensen is innocent, and Mendoza's own friends shot him and let the off-duty cops take the fall. Something told me the letter would end that way. Brady's guilty plea did not answer every question about McKellar's circle, and it did not undo the damage done to Daniel Mendoza's family. But it did make one thing harder to ignore. We wanted to cover this case because it was never only about one night, one truck, or one officer who fired a gun. When the people sworn to protect a community become the source of harm, the question cannot only be who pulled the trigger.

This is a story about a department, a culture, and the reality that Las Vegas was forced to face. As Ramon Mendoza continued to carry the grief of losing his son, activists, lawmakers, and residents asked what, if anything, Las Vegas was willing to change? Next week, we look at Ramon, the push for a Citizens Review Board, and the state of the city after Mortensen and Brady, and the larger question that Daniel's death left behind, when police power is abused, who has the authority to hold that power accountable? These questions are still relevant nearly 30 years later,

because what happens here happens everywhere. Thanks for listening. Visit sinspod.com slash subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to listen ad-free. Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can contact us at Questions at Sins and Survivors.com.

If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, Sins and Survivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, is researched written and produced by your host. Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, sins and survivors.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals

are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.