Police in Las Vegas say that murder suspects arranged a paid sex date to bring the victim in and squeeze her to their death.
An arrest report FOX5 got detailed information about a supposed plan to kidnap and murder Marayna Rodgers. Rodgers went missing on December 5 and was found dead in Henderson ten days later.
They were named as Sakari Harnden (19) and Chance Comanche (27), and they are both being charged with open murder.
As a professional basketball player, Comanche played in the NBA G-League before his team let him go today.
Harnden’s police report says that the two suspects started making plans to kill Rodgers at the end of November. They carried out their plan when Comanche’s team played in Las Vegas.
Several text messages suggested that each of the suspects first tried to get someone else to kill the victim.
Comanche told Harnden about the plan for the first time and said he would “run it by him” on November 30.
Comanche wrote to Harnden on the December 2: “I told my dad the whole plan.” That night, someone else, who the police didn’t name but only called “Tre” in the report, asked Comanche what he wanted to happen to the victim.
The police report says that Comanche responded with an emoji of a coffin. The group text kept going, and on December 4, the topic of locating a gun came up.
The Stockton Kings, Chance’s team, went to Las Vegas around 4 p.m. that day for a game and stayed at the M Resort.
In the group email, Comanche said, “I can snap her neck.” Harnden replied with a place where the murder could happen, and Comanche answered with a heart emoji.
After he got there, the police gave a timeline of his moves, which included getting into a gray Mercedes that matched Harnden’s car just after midnight on December 6.
Police got a search warrant and used cell tower data to track the suspects’ movements. They saw that the two suspects seemed to go from the hotel to the booze store together, where they encountered the victim.
Three cell phones were found to have used the same tower at 1:21 a.m., which “would suggest to detectives which Sakari, Marayna, or Chance were all traveling in tandem in the same vehicle.”
Police got surveillance video of the gray Mercedes pulling through the parking lot of the booze store. The people got out to buy alcohol and then went back to the car. At 2:18 a.m., all three phones used a different tower.
Around 3:35 a.m., the victim’s phone stopped working. It took less than 15 minutes to track both of the suspects’ phones to a nearby tower.
The LVMPD CAT team caught her on December 13 and turned her over to the police. She refused to talk to the police.
Video showed that Comanche went back to his room and then left the resort with his bags at 8:50 a.m. Police also said that around 10:24 a.m., Harnden was seen “leaving the hotel room, clearly upset and crying.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Bureau arrested Comanche on December 14 at the practice site where his team played.
He was put into the Sacramento County Jail by the Major Crimes Bureau of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office. He is there until he is sent to Las Vegas.
That day, he told police more about the plan and how it was carried out. He also said that he had met Harnden by means of a dating app about a year and a half before the crime. His story to the cops was that they went on dates, broke up, but kept in touch.
He told the police that Harnden had told the victim about some problems she was having with Rodgers and said that Rodgers would “smoke her” if she didn’t give her a Rolex watch.
The report says that Comanche and the other suspect “began making plans to lure Marayna out of the others so they could kill her.”
This led to the group text chat, where Comanche said that “Tre” didn’t want to help. The suspect is said to have then said that he would pay $3,000 “to get the job done sooner rather than later.”