Nye County Commissioner Leo Blundo is expected to be arraigned on Oct. 3, where he could enter a plea to charges that he choked his wife at their Pahrump home in March after he discovered more than $77,000 in cash and a gun went missing.
On Monday, Blundo was booked in the Nye County Detention Center on felony domestic battery charges and subsequently released.
Judge Richard Glasson, the special-appointed justice of the peace from Tahoe Justice Court at Stateline, South Lake Tahoe who is presiding over Blundo’s case, ruled via a teleconference preliminary hearing on Monday that prosecutors had shown enough evidence to hear the accusations against Blundo.
Esmeralda County District Attorney Robert Glennen has been appointed special prosecutor over the case.
Blundo has retained two private Las Vegas attorneys — Dominic Gentile and Paola Armeni, of Clark Hill PLC — who also appeared in a Pahrump courtroom on Monday via teleconference. Earlier this month, Blundo told the judge he planned to seek a public defender after meeting with several defense attorneys who were too expensive to retain, although he acknowledged he was likely over the income-threshold to qualify for free, court-appointed counsel.
March 911 call
Deputies were called on the afternoon of March 28 to Blundo’s Pahrump home, where the elected official reported that the cash and a Glock handgun had been stolen from him, according to the report from the Nye County Sheriff’s Office.
Blundo said the money and gun were stored in his SUV and a safe. A woman at the home, whose name was redacted in the report but later confirmed to be his wife, told a sheriff’s deputy that $8,000 in cash and another gun had been taken from the SUV in the past, but Blundo did not report it.
According to the incident report, the woman disclosed that Blundo held her down by her throat when he discovered the large quantity of money missing. In her written statement, she said he had called her names, “but then said that what I needed was a slap in the face like they could do in the 70s.”
More than five months passed before Blundo was officially charged this week in the case.
Blundo lost his seat for re-election in June’s Republican primary.
Blundo was arrested in 2020 on charges of misconduct of a public officer stemming from allegations that he illegally and unethically voted on coronavirus-related relief funding that benefited Blundo’s restaurant. The Nevada attorney general’s office declined to move forward with charges after the Nye County district attorney’s office referred the case for prosecution.
Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Sabrina Schnur contributed to this report.