Authorities say that a former Las Vegas judge who quit her job in 2021 to end a state investigation into her ethics and conduct has died.
Melanie Andress Tobiasson, 55, died Friday from a gunshot wound, according to the Clark County coroner’s office.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal said that the coroner said that the death was a suicide.
No other information about the death came out right away.
During Tobiasson’s last years as a justice of the peace in Las Vegas, there were rumours that she got too involved in a double-murder investigation.
Court records show that she died a few weeks after getting a divorce from her husband Murray Tobiasson.
When The Associated Press called Murray Tobiasson and asked him about the death of the former judge, he and the woman’s father, Don Andress, both said they didn’t want to talk about it.
Melanie Tobiasson agreed with the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline that she would step down from the bench in May 2021. As part of the deal, Tobiasson said she wouldn’t run for or accept a judicial position in the state “at any time in the future.”
Tobiasson told the Review-Journal at the time, “I have been slandered, lied about, and accused of wrongdoing, even though what I did was right and should be praised.” “I’m leaving because they’ve scared me and made up lies about me for three years.”
Tobiasson was accused of many things by the state’s Commission on Judicial Discipline, which said that she let family concerns affect how she acted.
The commission says that in 2015, Tobiasson asked Las Vegas vice detectives to look into Shane Valentine, who she said was trying to get her teenage daughter to become a prostitute.
The next year, Valentine, who had been convicted of a crime, was named a person of interest in a shooting in Las Vegas in October 2016 that killed Sydney Land, 21, and Nehemiah Kauffman, 20.
According to the Review-Journal, the commission said that Tobiasson “personally investigated” the case and reached out to Land’s mother while she was doing so “because she thought Valentine did the killings.”
Valentine has never been charged with shooting anyone. According to the court records, no one has been arrested in this case.
The Review-Journal said that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department looked into what Tobiasson did and found that she had not broken any laws.
Tobiasson was put on the bench for the first time in 2009. He got his Nevada law licence in January 1993.
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