A 36-year-old Henderson, Nevada resident now faces 35 felony counts after police say they uncovered a plot to carry out a mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, and recovered more than 50 firearms, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and suppressors, from a stolen vehicle and a nearby home.
Allison Howlett was arrested June 27 at a parking garage at the Sunset Station casino in Henderson after Howlett's spouse, Julie Howlett, called 911 to report a domestic dispute, a stolen vehicle loaded with guns, and threats of "suicide by cop" and a mass shooting. What began as a domestic violence call quickly escalated into a multi-agency counterterrorism investigation involving the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center.
The case, and the sheer volume of weaponry recovered, landed just days before Fourth of July celebrations across Southern Nevada, with law enforcement agencies already on heightened alert.
Henderson police responded to Julie Howlett's 911 call and used vehicle tracking technology to locate the stolen SUV at the Sunset Station parking garage. Officers boxed in the vehicle. Howlett refused commands to surrender.
In a detail that drew particular attention at a Tuesday news conference, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader told reporters:
"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 of the vehicle, further corroborating the reported threats of suicide by cop and having the means to carry out a mass shooting."
Officers eventually offered Howlett water to coax the window down. When Howlett lowered it, officers pulled the suspect from the vehicle and deployed a Taser during the struggle.
Inside the stolen SUV, police recovered 22 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A subsequent search warrant executed at Howlett's Henderson residence turned up 30 additional guns, seven suppressors, and thousands more rounds. The Washington Times reported the home cache included an M2.50-caliber machine gun and rifles fitted with grenade launchers, military-grade hardware that goes well beyond any plausible claim of personal self-defense.
The total haul: more than 50 firearms, suppressors, high-capacity magazines, and an enormous ammunition stockpile.
This was not, investigators said, a sudden domestic dispute that spiraled. Evidence presented at the news conference showed a pattern of alleged threats stretching back to at least January 2024.
LVMPD Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said investigators uncovered evidence of threats made "over an extended period of time."
"Some of that information included the threat of wanting to become an active shooter or to conduct a mass attack here in Las Vegas."
Koren added a pointed reference to the city's worst day. "Obviously, for our community here in Las Vegas, after dealing with One October, those types of threats are taken very seriously," he said, invoking the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting.
Police played an audio recording at the news conference, attributed to Howlett and recorded in 2024, that left little room for ambiguity. The New York Post reported a fuller version of the recording in which Howlett can be heard saying: "I swear to God, if the FBI doesn't come f, king arrest me, there's gonna be a f, king mass shooting." The recording continued: "You're going to be the reason that hundreds of people lose their g*****n life."
That recording was made more than a year before the June 27 arrest. A year in which, by the account investigators presented, the threat remained active and the weapons cache only grew.
Julie Howlett, who told FOX5 Las Vegas that the 22 guns recovered from the stolen vehicle belonged to her and were part of her inventory as a gun dealer, described a harrowing morning. She said the confrontation began after she discovered Allison using her credit card without permission.
"That morning, I woke up to Allison spending money on my credit card."
Julie Howlett said the situation escalated fast. "She came in with a gun," she told the station. "She was going to kill me. She took off. I ran outside. I had the gun still in my hand. I unloaded it."
Julie Howlett said she struggled to wrestle a firearm away after Allison allegedly pulled the trigger. She then called 911 and reported the stolen vehicle, the guns inside it, and the threats.
The charges filed against Allison Howlett span the breadth of the alleged conduct: making threats related to an act of terrorism, assault with a deadly weapon constituting domestic violence, grand larceny of a vehicle, 22 counts of grand larceny of a firearm, multiple weapons offenses involving machine guns, suppressors, and short-barreled rifles, and resisting a public officer while armed with a firearm. A Clark County judge set bail at $500,000.
The Henderson Police Department's arrest report identifies Howlett as transgender. Howlett told detectives in a recorded post-arrest interview, as reported by KSNV, that the couple had been married four years and were both transitioning to female while taking estrogen and progesterone.
Howlett denied planning a mass shooting or threatening anyone. The suspect claimed to have taken Julie's vehicle simply to leave after an argument and said the firearms inside were Julie's inventory, which she had planned to transport out of state. Howlett also claimed that users on the online platform Discord had falsely accused the suspect of making threats, and that all personally owned firearms had previously been legally transferred to Julie through an ATF-approved process.
Those denials sit uneasily alongside the audio recording investigators played at the news conference, a recording in which someone investigators attribute as Howlett explicitly warns of a future massacre.
Undersheriff Andrew Walsh said investigators are still working to determine a motive. But he offered a warning that carried weight given the arsenal recovered.
"The time from thought to act, that window has closed."
Walsh urged anyone who hears credible threats of violence to report them immediately. The implication was clear: this case could have ended very differently.
Several questions remain open. Investigators have not said how the weapons were acquired or whether all of them were legally possessed. It is unclear whether Julie Howlett faces any charges related to the firearms. The FBI Las Vegas Field Office told Fox News Digital it had nothing further to add beyond the officials' remarks at the news conference, a notably terse response given that the 2024 audio recording includes a direct reference to the FBI by name, with Howlett apparently daring the bureau to intervene.
Whether the FBI received or acted on any prior communications from Howlett referencing those recorded threats is a question that deserves a clear answer. If warnings this explicit were floating around for more than a year, and law enforcement did not act until a spouse's 911 call forced the issue, the public is entitled to know why.
Las Vegas carries a scar that no other American city shares in quite the same way. The 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting remains the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. When Koren invoked "One October" at the news conference, he was speaking to a community that does not need to be told what a mass shooting looks like.
That context makes the timeline here especially difficult to absorb. Threats allegedly began in January 2024. An audio recording captured explicit warnings of a massacre. More than 50 firearms, including fully automatic weapons and grenade launchers, were stockpiled. And yet the arrest came only after a spouse called 911 during a domestic dispute.
The system worked on June 27, barely, and only because one person picked up the phone. The question that lingers is whether it should have worked sooner.
When the window between a threat and an attack narrows to nothing, "see something, say something" is not enough. Someone has to be listening, and someone has to act.
