Colin Czech Indicted for Murder and Mayhem After Kenneth Brown Was Killed and Mutilated Near Downtown Las Vegas

The first public sentence from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department about Kenneth Brown’s death was built for a press release, not a charging document. On April 28, 2024, at about 4:44 a.m., dispatch took a report of a fight between two men in front of a business in the 1100 block of South Las Vegas Boulevard. Officers found the pair still involved near the 300 block of Charleston Boulevard. One man was unresponsive and bleeding from the head. Medical personnel pronounced him dead. The other man, identified in that first release as 31-year-old Colin Czech, was taken into custody. Homicide detectives said Czech had attacked the victim. He was booked in absentia into the Clark County Detention Center for open murder, because he was still in a hospital. The Clark County coroner would name the dead man and the cause. That was the official story on April 29.

The story that reached a grand jury a few months later did not sound like an altercation that got out of hand. Kenneth Brown was on a sidewalk near a downtown bus stop, missing his left eye and his left ear. A Metro crime-scene analyst told jurors the eyeball and the ear were on the ground near the body, and that an ear was sitting on top of a five-dollar bill. A witness put it in plainer language: “The dude was eating him. He was eating his face, like just munching.” Czech was found crouched over Brown, blood in his teeth and in his hair. Prosecutors said Brown died of blunt force trauma after his head was driven into the concrete. The mayhem count in the indictment accused Czech of disfiguring Brown by removing an eyeball and an ear by biting or chewing, or by means unknown. Open murder, the booking charge, is Nevada’s way of holding a killing open until the proof sorts murder from a lesser homicide. Mayhem is the charge that describes what was done to the body after, or during, the beating. They are not the same accusation.

Two attacks, one morning, and a name that was not the victim’s

The sequence started earlier than the bus stop, and it started with a different man. A 7-Eleven employee near Charleston and Las Vegas boulevards called 911 after a man tackled a customer in the parking lot, a little before the 4:44 a.m. dispatch that police later highlighted. Court accounts identified the store worker Czech allegedly went after as a man who sweeps the floors. The employee got away and back inside. Czech left. He turned up at another convenience store on Charleston, then across the street at the bus stop where Brown was. The attempted-murder count is that first attack, described in charging papers as an effort to kill the store worker “in the same manner” as Brown. Anyone reading only the April 29 press release would think this was one fight between two men. The indictment describes a man moving through the pre-dawn retail strip and not stopping at the first person he put on the ground.

What Czech told detectives is now part of the public record because it is in the arrest report and was tested, in a limited way, against competency law. He said he had been awake for about five days. He said he had been “tweaking.” He said something was possessing him. He said he had fought a shape-shifter. He said voices told him to kill a man named Drake, a person he did not know, and that when officers asked whether he had killed Drake he said yes. Asked what he used, he said, “my teeth,” and he said a higher power had helped him eat the man’s eyeballs and ears. He also, at the scene, claimed Brown had attacked him first. Those statements can all sit in the same file. They are not a defense. They are the words a defendant used before a lawyer, two doctors, and a judge had to decide whether he understood the charges and could assist counsel.

Chief Deputy Public Defender David Westbrook told a judge, at Czech’s first appearance, that he had spoken with his client and believed he was not competent. Czech had missed that first date in person because he was still hospitalized and appeared by video. Two doctors later signed off. On May 24, 2024, Justice Court Judge Christy Craig found him competent to stand trial. Westbrook’s line afterward is the one defense lawyers use when they lose this round and expect to fight it again: competency is fluid. A finding of competence is not a finding of sanity at the time of the crime, and it is not a verdict. It means the case is allowed to go forward in a courtroom. District Attorney Steve Wolfson warned early that cases with competency questions can take years. That warning has aged in public. In July 2024 a Clark County grand jury indicted Czech on murder, mayhem, and attempted murder. Bail was denied. He was ordered back to court in August 2024 for the post-indictment setting. Surveillance video later released to local reporters showed him outside the 7-Eleven beforehand, behavior that prosecutors called bizarre and that the tape does not explain.

What the docket has not finished saying

Age is one of the small facts this case still will not settle cleanly. The sheriff’s office said 31. Later reporting from the 8 News Now Investigators, working from court papers, said Colin Czech was 29. Both figures have circulated as if the other did not exist. The victim’s identity did settle. The coroner and the charging documents name him as Kenneth Brown. A hospital bracelet with that name was among the photographs local investigators obtained. Brown is not a public figure. He was a man at a bus stop before dawn, and the coverage that followed treated the mutilation as the headline and the person under it as a detail. That is a choice newsrooms make when the method of a killing is rare. It is also how a victim disappears from his own homicide.

Major Nevada outlets that covered the indictment have not published a trial verdict or a sentencing in Kenneth Brown’s killing. That absence is itself a fact about how Clark County handles a case once the cameras leave the arraignment. Open murder cases with a competency history and a mayhem count do not resolve on the timetable of a viral surveillance clip. Czech has remained the named defendant. He is presumed innocent of the indictment until a jury or a plea says otherwise. The grand-jury testimony is an accusation under oath, not a conviction. The arrest report is his account and the officers’ observations, not a judgment.

The legal architecture is worth reading slowly, because downtown Las Vegas produces enough overnight violence that the charging words get flattened into “murder arrest near the Strip.” Open murder let detectives book him before the coroner finished. Mayhem is what made this file different from a punch that ends with a head on concrete, which Nevada already sees too often, including later 2024 cases in which a single blow at a bus stop was charged as murder after a man died of a skull fracture days afterward. Attempted murder is the count that says the 7-Eleven was not a warm-up the state intends to ignore. Together they describe a theory of the morning: a man who attacked twice, killed once, and left pieces of the victim on the sidewalk.

Sheriff Kevin McMahill’s office asked anyone with information to call homicide at 702-828-3521 or email ho******@***pd.com. Crime Stoppers of Nevada remains the anonymous route, 702-385-5555. The original release is still posted by LVMPD. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the indictment and the video. The AEGIS Alliance covers related files on the Crime News and US News desks, including the Arkansas jail video of a deputy beating a man in a patrol car and the Atlanta case that ended in a $21 million judgment after an officer paralyzed a man. Different cities, same question about what the first official sentence leaves out.

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