Former Las Vegas Raiders player Henry Ruggs III’s defense team have suggested in a new court filing that firefighters’ slow response could be partly to blame for the death of a woman in a fiery car crash.
A witness claimed firefighters were slow to extinguish a RAV4 that burst into flames after Ruggs slammed his Corvette Stingray into it, defense attorneys David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld wrote in their filing, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Prosecutors allege Ruggs was speeding at up to 156 miles per hour and had a blood alcohol level of .161, twice Nevada’s legal limit, at the time of the crash. He had been partying at a swank golf venue in the MGM Grand earlier that night.
Firefighters were “in a position to extinguish the vehicle fire while it was in its infancy stages and failed to do so,” the court filing said.
“Firemen did not attempt to extinguish the fire at Ms. Tintor’s vehicle for approximately 20 minutes at which time the entire vehicle was engulfed in flames,” defense attorneys David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld said in a Wednesday court filing that does not identify their witness.
A county spokesman, Erik Pappa, said in a statement Thursday that there were “no delays in response or in the attack on the fire.”
“The captain on the scene reported that the vehicle was fully involved in fire upon arrival and the passenger compartment was not survivable for anyone inside,” the statement said.
