Fifty Guns. A Grenade Launcher.
An Alleged Plot Against the Strip.
On the morning of June 27, 2026, a 911 call from a Henderson, Nevada, home set off a two-hour manhunt that ended in the parking garage of the Sunset Station casino. Inside a stolen SUV, police say, sat a suspect on top of a loaded handgun, a silenced automatic rifle in the back seat, and more than twenty firearms in the cargo hold.
What investigators say they found next turned a domestic dispute into a terrorism investigation: a home arsenal that included a .50-caliber machine gun and two rifles fitted with grenade launchers, and a recorded statement from 2024 in which the suspect allegedly warned that if the FBI did not arrest her, “there’s gonna be a massacre.”
Henderson Police, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI called it a mass-casualty attack averted. It is also a case built on threats that, by police’s own account, had been circulating for two years before a family emergency finally forced the issue. This is the record, sourced to the briefing, the complaint, and the local desks that covered it.
- 50+firearmsseized from the stolen SUV and the Henderson home — LVMPD / FBI briefing
- 35felony countsfiled at the July 1 arraignment — Las Vegas Review-Journal
- $500Kbailset with high-level electronic monitoring — Henderson Justice Court
- 2024sincewhen the alleged mass-shooting threats began, police say
The call came in at 9:38 a.m. on Saturday, June 27. According to Henderson police, the caller — the suspect’s spouse — reported a domestic dispute, a stolen vehicle loaded with firearms, and threats that the suspect intended to commit “suicide by cop” or carry out a mass shooting. Officers reached the residence by 9:51 a.m. Using the vehicle’s tracking technology, they traced the stolen SUV to a parking garage at the Sunset Station casino in Henderson by 11:17 a.m.
What followed, police say, was a roughly two-hour standoff. The suspect, later identified as Allison Howlett, 36, of Henderson, remained inside the vehicle with loud music playing and refused repeated commands to surrender. Officers boxed the SUV in with patrol cars to prevent an escape. When Howlett asked for water, negotiators used the moment to gain control and remove her from the car; she was tased once during the arrest. No shots were fired and no one was hurt.
“It should be noted that the suspect had been sitting on a handgun and had access to a fully automatic, silenced MP5-style machine gun in the back seat.”
Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader · joint press conference, July 2, 2026
The Sunset Station garage is a short drive from the Las Vegas Strip. Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told reporters that investigators believe Howlett had made threats “over an extended period of time,” including “the threat of wanting to become an active shooter or to conduct a mass attack here in Las Vegas.” Howlett has not been convicted of any of it; she is presumed innocent, and her attorney has entered a not-guilty posture on her behalf.
The stolen SUV alone held 22 firearms, police say, along with suppressors, high-capacity magazines and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A search of the Henderson home Howlett shared with the vehicle’s owner turned up roughly 30 more firearms — putting the total, by the department’s count, at more than fifty guns.
The home inventory, as described by investigators and reviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was not a typical collector’s wall. It included an M2 .50-caliber machine gun, two Colt AR-style rifles fitted with M203 grenade launchers, seven suppressors and thousands of additional rounds. Court records and reporting also cite a Colt M4A1, an Atlantic Arms AK-47 and a launcher listed as an M5. In Nevada, unregistered machine guns, silencers and short-barreled rifles are the backbone of the weapons counts Howlett now faces.
One complicating fact runs through the cache: ownership. Howlett’s spouse, Julie Howlett, told FOX5 Las Vegas in an interview that the 22 guns recovered from the stolen SUV were hers — part of her inventory as a licensed firearms dealer, staged in the vehicle because she was preparing to transfer them to a retailer in Alabama. It is a detail that both explains the sheer volume of weapons and sharpens the larceny counts prosecutors have filed.
At the July 2 briefing, investigators played a profanity-laden recording they said was captured in 2024. On it, according to police, Howlett warned that if federal agents did not arrest her, a massacre would follow. Fox News reported the words as: “If the FBI doesn’t come arrest me, there’s gonna be a massacre. One day, hundreds of people are going to lose their lives.”
The spouse’s account, laid out in the charging documents, extends the timeline. She told detectives that from January 2024 to January 2025 Howlett made “numerous threats to commit mass shootings when she would get angry,” and that Howlett would “frequently put on body armor and grab a rifle” and ask to be driven to a homeless shelter. Police allege the pattern of threats stretched back more than two years before the June 27 arrest.
A rapid response by our officers to a June 27 domestic call, alongside LVMPD and the FBI, prevented what could have been a mass-casualty event in the Las Vegas valley. A suspect is in custody and dozens of firearms have been recovered.
Howlett, who is identified in the arrest report as transgender, denies the core of the case. According to the complaint, she told detectives she “denied wanting to hurt anyone and denied making any prior threats to commit a mass shooting,” said she took the vehicle only to leave after an argument, and claimed that “everyone is out to get her” and that users on the Discord platform had fabricated the accusations. Those denials are part of the record; a jury has not weighed them.
On July 1, 2026, Howlett was arraigned by video before Judge Barbara Schifalacqua in Henderson Justice Court on 35 felony counts. As enumerated by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Washington Times from the complaint, they break down as one count of assault with a deadly weapon constituting domestic violence, one count of grand larceny of a motor vehicle, 21 counts of grand larceny of a firearm, eight counts of possession of a machine gun or silencer, and four counts of possession of a short-barreled rifle or shotgun.
Here the reporting diverges, and it is worth being precise about it. Fox News and FOX5 Las Vegas described “making threats related to an act of terrorism” as among the counts. But the Review-Journal and the Washington Times, reviewing the filed complaint, reported that the 35 counts centered on weapons possession, firearm and vehicle larceny, and the domestic-violence assault — and that a standalone terrorism charge did not appear in the document. The office of Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson (D) did not confirm whether it would separately pursue a terrorism count.
The Southern Nevada Counterterrorism Center and our partners at the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force identified multiple threats tied to this suspect. If you see something, say something — reporting a threat can save lives.
The distinction is not academic. A terrorism-threat charge under Nevada law carries its own penalties and signals how prosecutors intend to frame intent; its absence from the initial complaint — even as police publicly described a “terrorism investigation” — is exactly the sort of gap that gets litigated between now and trial. The preliminary hearing is set for July 15, 2026.
The case pulled in three agencies. Henderson Police took the original 911 call and made the arrest; the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Southern Nevada Counterterrorism Center coordinated the threat assessment; and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which had already flagged “several threats,” joined from the outset. At the joint briefing, Henderson Chief Reggie Rader stood alongside LVMPD Undersheriff Andrew Walsh, Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren, and the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office, Christopher Delzotto.
Arresting agency: Henderson Police Department — Chief Reggie Rader.
Lead investigative partners: LVMPD Southern Nevada Counterterrorism Center (Undersheriff Andrew Walsh, Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren) and the FBI Las Vegas Field Office / Joint Terrorism Task Force (SAC Christopher Delzotto).
Prosecutor: Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson (D) — office declined to confirm a terrorism count.
Court: Henderson Justice Court, Judge Barbara Schifalacqua — bail $500,000, high-level electronic monitoring, no weapons, no contact with the domestic-violence victim.
Federal track: The FBI is coordinating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nevada on potential federal charges.
Koren framed the arrest less as a boast than as a plea to the public. “We stand here and tell these stories,” she said, “so that it reminds people that there’s help and there’s ways to get help, and there’s ways to report those threats.” That framing is worth holding onto: by the department’s own account, the threats were known for two years, and the arrest came only after a spouse picked up the phone.
Working with LVMPD and Henderson Police, our Joint Terrorism Task Force helped identify and stop a credible threat of mass violence in the Las Vegas valley. We thank the family member who came forward — reporting concerns to law enforcement works.
Howlett remains held on $500,000 bail with a preliminary hearing scheduled for July 15. If released, she would be subject to high-level electronic monitoring, barred from possessing weapons, and ordered to stay away from the domestic-violence victim. A public defender has been appointed. Whether the district attorney upgrades the complaint to include a terrorism count — and whether federal prosecutors bring their own case — are the two open threads.
“There's help and there's ways to get help, and there's ways to report those threats.”
Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren, LVMPD · July 2, 2026
Strip away the culture-war framing that has already attached to this case online, and what remains is a sober civic question. A suspect allegedly telegraphed a mass shooting for two years, kept — or had access to — an arsenal that included military-grade weapons, and was stopped not by the system that had reportedly heard the warnings but by a family member’s 911 call. Law enforcement deserves credit for the arrest. The two-year lag deserves scrutiny. Both can be true, and the trial will test which one the evidence supports.
