Robert Telles, a Las Vegas-area politician standing trial for the killing of an investigative reporter who wrote articles critical of him, spent a rambling final hour speaking for himself on the witness stand Thursday before ending his testimony with a declaration that he never killed anyone. “I am not the kind of person who would stab someone. I would never beat anybody up,” Telles told the jury on his second day of testimony in his trial in the death of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German. He said he a walked to a gym during the time on Sept. 2, 2022, that trial evidence and testimony has shown that German was killed. “I didn’t kill Mr. German,” Telles said. Prosecutors said Telles, a former Democratic administrator of a Clark County office that handles unclaimed estates, killed German because German wrote articles about an office in turmoil under Telles’ leadership, including allegations that Telles had an inappropriate relationship with a female coworker.
Telles told the jury he had been framed by a political and social “old guard” real estate network for trying to fight corruption in his office. The prosecution rested its case after four days, 28 witnesses and hundreds of pages of photos, police reports and video evidence. Telles, 47, practiced civil law before he was elected in 2018. German, 69, spent 44 years covering crime, courts and corruption for the Las Vegas Sun and the Review-Journal. Evidence has shown that Telles’ DNA was found beneath German’s fingernails and that Telles had family ties to a maroon SUV seen in German’s neighborhood about the time German was killed. Police found on Telles’ cellphone and computer hundreds of photos of German’s home and several pages of German’s identity records, including time stamps showing they’d been collected weeks before the killing.
At Telles’ house, police found cut-up pieces of a broad straw hat and a gray athletic shoe that looked like those worn by a person captured on neighborhood security video wearing an oversized orange long-sleeve shirt, carrying a big cloth satchel and slipping unto a side yard of German’s home before the reporter was ambushed and left dead in a pool of blood.
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