Some calls are a problem to be solved. This one was a house on fire with people dying inside it.
What happened
August 10, 12:29 a.m., 4500 block of Pigeon Point Court in Las Vegas. A woman called 911 and said her boyfriend, 48-year-old Jason Simmons, was trying to set her on fire with a blowtorch.
On the recording she says, “he is about to burn me up.” That call is going to stay with the dispatcher who took it.
While officers were en route she updated dispatch: she had been shot and was hiding in a bathroom. Her teenage daughter was in a separate bedroom.
LVMPD officers arrived to find gasoline fires burning through the house and smoke filling it. They formed an entry team and went in. In a front bedroom they found the girl with a gunshot wound. She had been shot before officers ever reached the house. LVMPD went out of its way to correct early coverage that left that question open.
Working through the house, they came to a locked master bedroom door. An officer kicked it. Simmons fired seven rounds through the locked bedroom door. One hit her in the center of the chest.
It went through 24 layers of Kevlar and stopped inside her vest, leaving a bleeding abrasion. She fired 11 rounds back. The team pulled off the door and declared a barricade.
LVMPD SWAT and crisis negotiators responded. The girlfriend, still on the phone with dispatch, reported that Simmons had shot himself. She came out of the house and was transported in critical condition with burn injuries and a gunshot wound.
SWAT entered and found 14-year-old Aven Drummond in the front bedroom. Despite life-saving measures she was pronounced dead at the scene. She would have turned 15 two days later.
Simmons was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A rifle, three handguns and a blowtorch were recovered.
Doors, hallways and stairwells
Every cop knows the phrase. Doors, hallways and stairwells will get you killed. They are the places where you have no cover, no angle, and no way to see what is on the other side.
And every cop takes them anyway, because there is nobody else to take them. That is the entire job compressed into one sentence. Somebody has to go through the door, and the person who has to is you.
She went to that door because it was the last unknown in the house. She never got it open — he fired through it while she was standing in front of it, in the worst possible place on that entire scene.
Watch how they worked it
The first thirty seconds are chaos. Fire alarms screaming. Smoke. Open flame. A shot child. A suspect nobody has located yet. Any one of those alone would be a bad call.
Then something happens that is worth studying: they slow down.
They stop moving fast and start moving right. They call rooms out loud. They announce themselves. One officer says “I am going into this room, I need someone with me” — and somebody goes with her. Another coordinates movement: “Let us move up, guys. I am with you.”
That is training taking over on a scene that had every excuse to fall apart. Nobody freelanced. Nobody got separated. In a burning house with an armed man somewhere in it, that discipline is the only thing standing between a bad night and a catastrophic one.
The vest
The round struck high on her carrier, near the center of her chest. It punched through 24 layers of Kevlar and stopped. She was treated at UMC for a bleeding abrasion and chest injuries and released.
That is as close as it gets.
Context that matters
This was LVMPD’s tenth officer-involved shooting of 2026 — and it came six days after Officer Austin Abdelnabi was shot and killed in the line of duty. Two officers shot in under a week in one city.
End of Watch, Officer Abdelnabi.
What they did
They walked into fire and smoke on a call about a woman being burned alive, found a child who had already been shot before they arrived, took fire through a door, and kept working. The suspect ended it himself. The girl did not make it, and her mother was still fighting as of the last reporting.
There is no clean ending to write on this one. There is just a group of officers who went into a burning house because somebody had to.
