Gang rape allegations at Cornell University have reverberated from the Ivy League campus into the national media, sparking a conversation that has raised troubling questions about victims’ rights, university policies, and police investigations. But for Nevada, those questions are not abstract. The state ranks fifth in the nation in sexual assault rate and second in per capita domestic violence cases, and most of those cases never attract the kind of attention now being paid to Cornell. Here is one of them. It happened in 2017, and it is particularly egregious for the victim, not only because of the assault itself but because of the years her case spent languishing in police files and court dockets. On Feb. 2, 2017, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detectives received a call from St. Rose Hospital. A woman reported she had been raped the night before during a night out at Town Square. Her memory was understandably fragmented, but she knew one horrific detail: her assailants had videotaped the attack. Police took her to University Medical Center, where a sexual assault nurse examiner gathered evidence. Then she sat with Detective Robert Garris, who quickly obtained a search warrant for a Haven Street residence owned by Christopher Reindl. Inside, police recovered video, DNA, and witness statements that implicated two more men: Joseph Anthony Paterna and Christopher John Alloca. It should have been one of the strongest cases the unit saw that year. Instead, for no explained reason, the hot case went cold and stayed that way for years while the victim waited.
At the time, Metro was already trying to recover from a scandal involving thousands of untested rape kits, and the department had formed a dedicated sexual assault cold case unit with federal support. Millions of dollars were eventually poured into that effort. In 2021, U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto announced nearly $2 million in Department of Justice funding to help process the backlog of rape tests. It was not until 2022, however, that cold case detectives happened to read the woman’s file. Perhaps a tip prompted the review; perhaps it was random. In any case, the victim stepped forward again. That December, she testified before a Clark County grand jury, and in January 2023, the jury issued an indictment. Reindl, Paterna, and Alloca were charged with more than two dozen counts of sexual assault and attempted sexual assault, and Reindl and Paterna were additionally charged with first-degree kidnapping. Reindl and Alloca were released after posting bond. The charging documents misspelled Reindl as “Riendl” and Alloca as “Allocca,” small errors in a case already defined by larger ones. It had been almost six years since the woman made her first call to police, and all three names had been sitting in the investigative file for most of that time. The evidence existed in 2017; what was missing was attention.
The human cost of that missing attention cannot be measured in court filings. The victim did everything the system asks of a rape survivor: she reported promptly, agreed to a forensic exam, and told Garris what she remembered—including the sickening truth that the attack had been recorded. That detail alone was enough to haunt her for years. Every time a phone rang, she might have wondered if the video had surfaced. Every time she saw a man fitting one of the descriptions, she might have wondered if he was one of the three whose names police already knew. She watched the investigation begin with energy and then fall silent. There were no editorial board meetings about her case, no protests outside the courthouse. She had no name in the newspaper, just a history that would be retold by a columnist years later. Anonymity protects survivors, but it also allows the public to look away. When the case finally came back to life, she had to sit before a grand jury and testify again, reopening a wound that had been left open for nearly six years. She testified in December 2022, and then had to wait another month for an indictment. That kind of resilience is remarkable, but it should not be required. No survivor should have to prove her worth by enduring the system’s delays. The fact that she was willing to do it shows both her strength and the failure of everyone who let her case lapse.
The passage of time did not treat the defendants gently either, but in very different ways. Just months after the indictment, Reindl died in his sleep at a family member’s home in Ohio. He was 47, a well-known powerboat builder and racer in Las Vegas, and his death was met with genuine grief in the offshore racing community. One admirer told Speedonthewater.com that Reindl was “an amazing person with a passion for his family, his team, and most importantly, the boating community.” Offshore Powerboat Association President Ed Smith called him a colorful and passionate character who could make you want “to wring his neck,” but whose smile and attitude made that impossible. Another friend remembered him as “the life of the party.” His death meant he would never face a jury. Reindl’s roommate, Paterna, spent a year in detention before being found incompetent to stand trial in 2024, leaving him effectively beyond the reach of the criminal justice system. Alloca, the third defendant, has remained free on bond; after multiple continuances and an amended indictment charging him with four counts of sexual assault, he is scheduled for a jury trial on Feb. 22, 2027—ten years after the night in question. Not a single defendant has yet been held accountable in a courtroom. Meanwhile, the woman who reported the assault has been left to arrange her life around a trial date that keeps moving further away.
Why did this case go cold? No official has offered an explanation. Calls to current and former Metro sexual assault detectives were either not returned or directed to the department’s public information officer, who had not responded as of Friday. In a brief exchange with a former Metro supervisor, the columnist was reminded that the only media outlet to report on the case was a publication called The Baltimore Post-Examiner, in an article by Doug Poppa. That detail is telling. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department spent years and millions of dollars trying to repair its credibility after the rape kit scandal, yet this case—one with DNA, video, witnesses, and a cooperative victim—was allowed to sit idle for half a decade. The state’s grim statistics, fifth in sexual assault rate and second in per capita domestic violence cases, suggest this is not an isolated mistake but a systemic pattern. The Cornell case inspired national outrage because it happened in an elite institution; the Las Vegas case inspired almost nothing because it happened to an ordinary woman in a state that has learned to live with bad rankings. If not for the cold case unit’s review, this file might still be buried. The public deserves to know how many other files like it remain buried today. The victim deserves to know why her case was different—and why no one in the department has been willing to say sorry.
The conclusion is unavoidable. One defendant is dead, another has been found incompetent to stand trial, and a third has never been locked up and will likely not go to trial before 2027. Justice has been delayed so long that it is now in danger of becoming justice denied. The real question is why. Why, in the wake of Metro’s rape kit debacle and the millions spent to repair the self-inflicted damage to the department’s credibility, did this case still manage to fall through the cracks? The victim deserves answers, and the public has a right to know them. John L. Smith, an author and longtime columnist with Nevada roots dating to 1881, wrote this column in hopes of prompting those answers. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters, and Desert Companion, but no byline matters as much as the woman’s story. She did everything right. She reported, she allowed the exam, she spoke to detectives, she testified not once but twice, and she waited. The system was supposed to move for her. Instead, it made her wait the way too many survivors wait: quietly, without power, without answers, without apology. If the national conversation sparked by Cornell means anything, it should include the stories of women like her. It should demand not only better university policies, but better police work, better court scheduling, and better accountability. It should make sure that a victim who calls a hospital in Las Vegas no longer has to wonder if anyone will ever call back.