Las Vegas Man Indicted for Murder and Mayhem After Allegedly Killing Kenneth Brown and Eating His Eye and Ear

Kenneth Brown died on a downtown Las Vegas sidewalk in the dark of April 28, 2024, missing an eye and an ear. Colin Ichiro Czech, then 29, was kneeling next to him with biological matter in his hair, his mouth, and on his clothes. He told officers Brown had attacked him first. He later told detectives he had been awake five days, that something was “possessing him,” that he had fought a “shape-shifter,” and that voices wanted him to kill a man named Drake. When they asked what he had used, he said, “my teeth.”

The first 911 call, around 4 a.m., came from a 7-Eleven employee who said Czech had tackled a customer outside the store at South Las Vegas Boulevard and Charleston. About 45 minutes later a second caller said a man at a bus stop was “eating” another man’s face. Police and the Clark County Coroner identified the dead man as Brown. A crime-scene analyst later told a grand jury the eyeball and ear were on the ground near the body. Investigators say Czech punched him until his head hit concrete.

Czech was booked for open murder, no bail, Clark County Detention Center. He missed his first court date because he was still in the hospital, then appeared by video. His public defender, David Westbrook, asked for a competency exam. On May 24, 2024, after two doctors signed off, Judge Christy Craig found him competent. “Competency is fluid,” Westbrook said. In July 2024 a grand jury indicted him for murder, mayhem, and attempted murder — mayhem for chewing off the eye and ear, attempted murder for the 7-Eleven worker he allegedly went after first. District Attorney Steve Wolfson warned early that competency cases “can take years.” No verdict has been reported.

For more from this desk, see The AEGIS Alliance’s 犯罪新闻 and the Las Vegas Review-Journal on the indictment.

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