What police first described as the road rage-inspired killing of an innocent mother of four has morphed into a more complex scenario, prompting tough questions and a backlash against her family.
Tammy Meyers, 44, was shot in the head outside her home in a Las Vegas cul-de-sac shortly before midnight Thursday after confrontations that began when she was giving her 15-year-old daughter an after-hours driving lesson and the girl honked at a driver she felt was speeding, police said.
Those facts haven’t changed, police Lt. Ray Steiber said Tuesday at a news conference, where he noted that the mother’s life-support was disconnected on Valentine’s Day, and insisted that she alone is “our victim.”
But the fatal shooting turned out to be a two-way shootout, provoked by an encounter with unidentified assailants, after Tammy Meyers had her daughter rouse her older son Brandon, who grabbed his gun and joined her in a hunt for the driver she had encountered earlier, Steiber said.
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“They left the house in search of that person,” Steiber said, and found a grey or silver four-door sedan matching the description of the car in the earlier confrontation. She followed the “suspect vehicle,” then they broke apart and she drove home. Then the vehicle came into their cul-de-sac.
“There was a volley of rounds fired from that vehicle,” and Brandon Meyers “returned fire,” the officer said. “When the firing was done, he found that his mother had been struck by gunfire. The suspect vehicle then backed out and sped away. That’s what happened. Tammy is a victim.”
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