Left inset: Roidan Mendoza (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department). Right inset: Marillorky Tamayo Cruz (GoFundMe). Background: The Destinations Spring Valley apartment complex at 3925 S. Jones Blvd. in Las Vegas, Nev., where Roidan Mendoza shot and killed his estranged wife Marillorky Tamayo Cruz (KTNV).
A Nevada man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for murdering his estranged wife in front of their kids following a family court hearing in which she was awarded custody and the family home.
Prosecutors say Roidan Mendoza, 40, of Las Vegas, was “upset that he”s losing control” of his children and wanted to “get revenge” on his former spouse, Marillorky Tamayo Cruz, by shooting her dead in August 2023, according to local CBS affiliate KLAS and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“He wants to be vindicated,” Clark County Deputy District Attorney Corey Hallquist said in court Wednesday at Mendoza’s sentencing after he pleaded guilty on Aug. 25, 2025, to murder with use of a deadly weapon.
“There’s really nothing that can put you in that moment, right?” Hallquist said about what Tamayo Cruz experienced on the night she was shot, with the woman being at her mother’s apartment with family when Mendoza showed up and killed her.
“To feel the terror and the horror that’s going on in the apartment complex,” Hallquist recounted. “When the defendant decided that he was going to execute his wife in front of his child and his stepdaughter.”
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Three people, including Tamayo Cruz, were shot that evening. Mendoza fired 11 times into the apartment’s locks and broke into the home to find Tamayo Cruz in a bedroom, where he blasted her with “an execution-style shot to the forehead,” according to Hallquist.
The family court hearing in which Mendoza lost custody was earlier that same day. The couple was in the process of getting a divorce and Mendoza was supposed to be meeting up with Tamayo Cruz to switch cars, according to reports.
Tamayo Cruz’ daughter, who was 14 years old at the time, tried to stop Mendoza by stabbing him in the back with a knife. He took the blade away from her afterward and then tried slashing her back, but the teen managed to block the attack with her hands, leaving her with lacerations.
“I had to protect what I had left,” the now-17-year-old said in court at Mendoza’s sentencing. “So I grabbed a knife from the ground, and I planned to kill him.”
The daughter added, “I am not a tall person, nor was I strong. I was a 14-year-old girl trying to defend myself and my family.”
Mendoza apologized to Tamayo Cruz’ family in court on Wednesday, telling them through an interpreter that he didn’t go to her mother’s home “with the intention to harm anyone,” according to KLAS.
“I have a lot of pain in my heart,” Marilu Cruz-Tamayo, the victim’s mom, told Mendoza.
The man’s public defender claimed Mendoza “knows he shouldn’t have lost control, but unfortunately, he did,” per the Review-Journal.
“He didn’t want this to happen, he never wished it did, but being upset and angry and injured, he entered into this red zone of emotions,” the lawyer said.
Mendoza was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and two consecutive terms of 8 to 20 years in prison on the deadly weapon enhancements.
