They came to Sin City in pursuit of an off-road thrill. None survived

Eleesha Dorsey had taken on the role of “best woman” for her brother’s wedding in stride.

The 31-year-old from Maryland organized a quintessential Sin City bachelor party in July 2023, complete with a Michael Jackson-themed show on the Strip for her super-fan brother, Chesler. But some Googling came up with an even better thrill: an ATV ride at Nellis Dunes, an off-highway-vehicle area near the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

It was the hottest month of the year, and the unforgiving desert heat would reach 110 degrees that day.

Dorsey woke up late, threw on a black dress and took an Uber north on Interstate 15 to the dunes, northeast of Nellis Air Force Base. After a short safety briefing around 2:30 p.m., off they went into some 10,000 acres of desert, which for years have retained visible scars of well-traveled trails.

The next place she’d go is the Clark County coroner’s office in a body bag. Death investigators would record her internal body temperature at 115 degrees.

“This is a life that was taken,” said her mother, Grace C.L. Dorsey Edwards, in a recent interview. “A life that was lost that didn’t have to be lost. What really angered me the most is that it’s almost as though life didn’t matter.”

A Las Vegas Review-Journal investigation has identified four female tourists, including Dorsey, who visited Southern Nevada and died of heat illness on rented ATVs during the three-year period that began in the summer of 2023. The news organization conducted interviews and reviewed hundreds of pages of police documents, court records and autopsy reports, along with 911 calls and body camera footage.

Three of the deaths are tied to companies that, according to a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, are illegally running unguided tours at Nellis Dunes with the federal agency’s permission. A fourth death this July, at a small desert outpost across the Arizona border, highlights the fact that guided tours also can pose serious safety risks, especially during hot summer months.

Now, between federal and state wrongful death lawsuits, Edwards claims land managers, ATV companies and the ticketing platform Viator failed to take measures to protect riders like her daughter. Her federal lawsuit calls on the BLM to enforce the laws that govern which tour companies must have permits.

‘Someone died out here two weeks ago’

Less than an hour into her rental, Dorsey said she wasn’t feeling well and decided to go back to the entry point. The company she booked was The ATV Xperience. Earlier that year, a cease-and-desist letter from the BLM had ordered the company to halt “non-permitted activities” on BLM-managed lands.

One of the bachelor party members, Chesler’s friend Eric Fruits, noticed Dorsey was missing and went looking with a guide. Fruits found her on the ground, unconscious.

A 911 call released by the Metropolitan Police Department reveals that Fruits was on hold for five minutes before he reached an operator, who talked him through about 17 minutes of chest compressions. It was no use.

“Our ATV guide, when he first started looking for us, said someone died out here two weeks ago,” Fruits told the operator through hurried breaths.

“They’re on their way,” the operator interjected. “They’re coming.”

The person who died two weeks earlier was Nakeia Cole, 42, a nurse from Youngstown, Ohio.

Her sister, Alona Carter, said in a recent interview that Cole and her husband, Steven, had been together for two decades but recently had been experiencing marital troubles. The trip the couple took to Las Vegas in early July 2023 was a test of their marriage: If they returned home and were still fighting, Nakeia Cole planned to separate from her husband, Carter said.

“This was either a goodbye vacation or a rekindle vacation,” Carter said. “But he made it back, and she didn’t.”

Steven Cole could not be reached for comment.

The pair took about a 21-mile ride from their hotel, the Elara by Hilton Grand Vacations on the Strip, to Las Vegas Outdoor Fun on July 8, a police report shows. The company is one of the most popular, full-time tour operators at Nellis Dunes.

Nakeia Cole later called the company for help because she was lost, according to the police report. The company advised her to climb to the highest point and ride toward Las Vegas Boulevard.

Steven Cole returned his ATV without his wife, saying she was driving fast and left him behind, according to the coroner’s report.

The police report states that the company had tried to reach her three times with no answer, and about an hour and a half after the initial call, an employee found the scene of what appeared to be a crash. She was unresponsive.

Investigators who arrived later said Nakeia Cole’s abdomen was discolored from sun exposure, her eyes and ears covered in sand. The high temperature that day was 105 degrees.

The coroner found that her death was caused by heat illness and blunt force injuries from a crash. She was survived by three children and four grandchildren, her obituary states.

For years, Carter said, she and the rest of Nakeia Cole’s family have thought there was more to the story, even though the coroner ruled the death accidental. She said grief over the loss led to her mother’s death last year.

Carter, who lives in Arizona but grew up with her sister in Ohio, recalls telling her sister to prepare for Las Vegas’ extreme summer weather and suggested buying Liquid I.V., a powdered electrolyte drink mix.

“This heat is a different kind of heat,” Carter said. “It’ll suck the life out of you.”

A Review-Journal reporter and photographer rented ATVs from Las Vegas Outdoor Fun on a Tuesday in mid-September, when temperatures flirted with the upper 90s. While a standard safety video was marked “required” on the registration email, an employee joked that most probably hadn’t watched it or paid attention.

Neither the employees nor the safety video mentioned the heat, though employees advised the group of the basic functions of the vehicles, what spots to avoid and how to call for help if needed.

Upon return, Review-Journal staffers saw Las Vegas police officers at the tail end of a helicopter rescue effort of someone who appeared to be a hiker.

“It happens all the time,” a Las Vegas Outdoor Fun employee said.

He added that the vastness of the dune area, combined with visitors’ general disregard for their personal safety, can be a deadly combination.

A Metro spokesman said the incident generated no police report, and the department quoted the Review-Journal $1,541.80 for the relevant body camera footage. The news organization opted not to pay for it.

Despite multiple requests, Metro has said it cannot provide the number of calls for service it receives for Nellis Dunes, which is part of the agency’s jurisdiction. Without that information, it is unclear how often the department dispatches officers to assist visitors who may be injured or require a rescue.

Since 2014, 10 people have died at Nellis Dunes, according to the coroner. Two of the deaths were ruled suicides, and another was ruled an accidental overdose. Aside from the three female tourists, three male Southern Nevada residents have died there while riding ATVs. In addition, passersby found the body of a 29-year-old Las Vegas man in August 2019 after he died from heat illness.

Are companies operating illegally?

The Coles went on an unguided tour. Once they left Las Vegas Outdoor Fun’s staging area on private property, employees would only go looking for them if they requested help through the company’s emergency number. Cell service can be spotty in the area.

But Las Vegas Outdoor Fun owner Joe Haldiman said he wishes he were allowed to send his staff to either guide or supervise tours. He can’t because he doesn’t have what’s known as a special recreation permit. The BLM has denied his request for one several times because of strict limits that the agency sets.

BLM rangers have reprimanded Haldiman’s employees for leaving the company’s property at all, he said.

“They said, ‘You’re not allowed to step foot on our land. If someone needs help, too bad,’” Haldiman said in an interview. “It’s almost inhumane in my book.”

The issue of unlicensed companies is a central tenet of Edwards’ federal lawsuit against the BLM. The suit asserts that the agency has instructed company owners that unguided, commercial tours like Dorsey’s are allowed in the absence of a permit.

Attorneys have argued that the law says otherwise.

“There were ample opportunities for BLM to prevent Eleesha’s tragic death and injuries to many others,” lawyer John Quinn wrote in the complaint.

The complaint argues that the BLM has failed to shut down companies that operate without a permit, even though regulations explicitly state that one is required if vehicle rentals are commercial. Commercial rentals use paid advertising or collect fees, according to the BLM.

John Bernetich, who specializes in public lands law at the firm Williams Weese Pepple & Ferguson and is not involved in the Dorsey case, said in an interview that existing federal law leaves some room for interpretation.

“It gets fuzzy if you are renting an off-road vehicle to a client from somewhere that’s close to but not on federal land,” Bernetich said. “If you say, ‘Here are some maps. Go where you want, and have it back by 5 p.m, and we as the renting company have no knowledge of where you’re taking it,’ that arguably is a little closer to the line of whether you need a permit.”

Haldiman confirmed that the BLM allows his company to run unguided tours without a permit.

Rickey Ware, owner of The ATV Xperience, which Dorsey rented from, said in a sworn deposition that rangers told him he could rent ATVs, as long as he was not doing guided tours and did not physically step on BLM land. According to the Dorsey lawsuit, Ware began his tours on a small strip of state-owned land.

The Review-Journal obtained the cease-and-desist letter that land managers sent Ware five months before Eleesha Dorsey’s death, but the letter did not keep the owners from continuing to run tours. Ware, who has since filed for bankruptcy and no longer has legal counsel, declined to comment on the state lawsuit when reached by phone, as did the other defendant in the case, the ticketing company known as Viator.

In an official response filed in court, Viator’s lawyers wrote that Dorsey failed to protect her own safety, outweighing any negligence for which the company could be held responsible.

Only six ATV tour companies have permits to operate at Nellis Dunes, according to a list provided in response to a records request filed by the Review-Journal in March. This October, the BLM declined to answer a list of detailed questions about its approach to managing the area. It also declined to comment on the lawsuit or contribute any response for this article and did not provide information about how many ATVs are rented at the dunes each year.

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that the law creates “no direct mandate” for how the BLM must enforce federal law or warn the public of recreational hazards such as extreme heat.

While off-highway-vehicle tour permits for public land are managed federally, state and local laws govern who is allowed to ride an ATV. In Nevada, anyone regardless of age or whether they have a driver’s license can ride an ATV off-road if it is properly registered, according to the Nevada Commission on Off-Highway Vehicles.

A spokeswoman for the commission offered no comment on the deaths or what could be done to prevent them, saying that the state’s role is limited to providing grant funding for law enforcement, education and trail maintenance. The ATV Safety Institute, one of the nation’s leading safety training organizations, declined to weigh in on the policies related to safety.

Bullets and Burgers tours riddled with issues

A similar tourist death happened on a tour run through Bullets and Burgers in White Hills, Arizona, a few miles past the state border near Lake Mead.

Owner Russell Mann holds an active permit for guided tours at Nellis Dunes, but it is unclear whether his operation in Arizona is also permitted. When reached by phone, Mann declined to be interviewed for this article. Multiple BLM employees did not reply to inquiries about Mann’s company.

Lashawn Ashe, a 33-year-old who recently had relocated to Dallas from her native New York City, decided to pay a visit to her uncle, Darryl Taylor, in Las Vegas this July. She hoped to make it an annual trip. Taylor said he was like a father to Ashe and her sister, Latisha, both of whom briefly lived with him as children.

Ashe, who hadn’t seen Taylor in half a decade or met his new wife and stepdaughter, came up with ATVs as a bonding activity. After meeting up with a tour van at Mandalay Bay on the Strip and signing a waiver, they traveled to White Hills.

That ATV tour company and machine gun shooting range is part of Mann’s thrill empire, which now includes operations at several locations across the Mojave Desert. Two of his most popular offerings are tours run out of the Last Stop Gas Station in White Hills and Las Vegas Outdoor Adventures at Nellis Dunes.

Ashe chose what Mann advertises as a half-day Mojave Desert tour. On the Bullets and Burgers website, the tour area is described as “an exclusive private trail not open to other companies or the general public,” though he offers other tours at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Mann is a felon who was sentenced to five years in federal prison in the early 2000s for his role in a scheme to cheat investors out of $10.5 million through the promotion and sales of fraudulent wireless cable television systems. A judge ordered him to pay about $10.4 million in restitution, according to court documents.

Mann’s company also is associated with an infamous incident in 2014 in which a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot and killed her instructor with a Mini Uzi machine gun.

In an interview, Taylor said he noticed on the July outing that half of the ATV tour participants were far behind, including his niece. When he found her, she was on the ground, and her tour mates were offering her water and Gatorade. The guide led the others back to the base camp some 45 minutes away, but Taylor stayed behind with Ashe and awaited help.

A tour guide came back in a four-seater, but he and Taylor couldn’t lift Ashe on their own. The skin on her knees began to peel as her body temperature rose and she lost consciousness.

“I was trying to be optimistic,” Taylor said. “I was just in kind of a denial stage, too. I was almost dehydrated, at the point where I thought, ‘No, I know she’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be fine.’”

It would be at least an hour before, finally, a guide came back with two volunteer firefighters from Mohave County, Taylor said. There wasn’t much else they could do after loading Ashe onto the four-seater and taking her back to base camp.

“Her skin is scuffing off on her leg, she was so hot,” one of the firefighters told a sheriff’s deputy, according to body camera footage.

The weather station at the Las Vegas airport recorded a daily high of 114 degrees.

Ashe’s relatives plan to file a wrongful death lawsuit similar to Edwards’ once they establish her estate in Nevada, said their attorney, Charlie Jackson.

Mann’s company has a sour reputation among former employees, several of whom said in interviews that a culture of carelessness and putting profit above safety has created the conditions within which injuries, and now a death, happen.

Separately, a Delaware woman named Charmador Brown filed a personal injury lawsuit against Mann and his company for compensation over the burns she claimed she suffered on her legs in August 2020 when an ATV allegedly malfunctioned. The lawsuit was settled out of court with terms that were not publicly disclosed.

Brad Campbell, who worked with Mann for about 12 years in various roles, said in an interview that the company, for years, has hemorrhaged employees because of what he sees as mismanagement.

Campbell, who was working that 2014 day when the 9-year-old girl shot her instructor, said he saw a death like Ashe’s coming.

Taylor said that on the day Ashe died, he witnessed the guides on the phone with Mann, worried about how their every move might make them lose their jobs. Campbell said Mann often micromanages guides, docking their pay if they get a bad review or drive above the speed limit.

“She didn’t need to die that day. She didn’t. That never should have happened,” Campbell said.

Campbell said guides should be, at minimum, certified to administer CPR, and that companies should not run tours in the hottest parts of the summer.

One tour company swears off ATVs

Learning about the circumstances that led to Ashe’s death has been particularly troubling for Eric Brashear, who runs the extreme sports area known as Adrenaline Mountain. His business is a few miles down a dirt road from the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, at a higher elevation than Nellis Dunes or White Hills, making it several degrees cooler.

Brashear owns all 400 acres of the area’s property, allowing him to run off-highway-vehicle tours, a machine gun shooting range and a controlled monster truck ride — all with a Clark County permit, not one from the BLM. Brashear said he attempted to get a BLM special recreation permit at first, but was told that no other permits would be issued anytime soon from the Las Vegas office.

One important distinction between his business and Mann’s, Brashear said, is that he does not allow visitors to ride ATVs, only making available so-called UTVs, which are significantly more expensive but seat at least two people and have a ceiling and walls.

Adrenaline Mountain has run about 5,000 tours a year over its 6-year life, Brashear said, and only one serious injury — a broken arm — has occurred. To learn that four deaths have occurred under the watch of other tour operators is mind-boggling, he said.

If people die, “you should have your license revoked,” Brashear said, the piercing sound of machine guns triggering an explosive on a junk car behind him. “What does it take to ensure people’s safety?”

Over the past few years, Brashear said, he’s hired many of Mann’s guides who grew tired of his business practices.

One of them is Eric Hall, a Las Vegas resident who ran tours for Mann at Nellis Dunes and White Hills. Hall said no company should be running ATV tours when it gets above 110 degrees.

“These tourists genuinely cannot comprehend what they are getting themselves into, and that is on the company and the guides to properly prepare them for,” Hall said.

In his experience, many of the companies, including Mann’s, do not.

“They skirt the line between right and wrong a lot just to stay clear and keep the business going without any bad PR,” Hall said.

Another death as recent as August

Over time, as death accounting improved and the coroner began considering heat in its investigations, it has become commonplace that hundreds of heat deaths are recorded each year in Las Vegas, the second-fastest-warming city in the nation.

Deaths tied to ATVs and the heat, and to unlicensed companies, haven’t stopped.

Another woman, 32-year-old Chynna Otero-Aqueron from Buffalo, New York, died of heat illness on one of Las Vegas Outdoor Fun’s unguided tours this August while visiting her friend, identified in an autopsy report as Tatiana Gavila. Otero-Aqueron’s ATV had rolled over, and the pair were unable to flip it back.

The 108-degree heat killed the New York woman before help could arrive.

In a 911 call, Gavila was unable to name Nellis Dunes or tell dispatchers where to go. At one point, likely suffering from the beginnings of heat illness, Gavila said it felt like ants were crawling all over her body. First responders later treated the distraught woman at the scene for what a police report described as minor injuries.

Haldiman, the company owner, said he never heard a word from the BLM or local authorities about the deaths of Cole or Otero-Aqueron after the day they happened. He added that he struggled with whether to reach out to the families, unsure if condolences from the tour operator would make a difference if the roles were reversed.

“We’re going to continue doing the best we can so these folks don’t have this problem ever again,” Haldiman said. “We didn’t do anything wrong, and we don’t want someone to pass away who rents our vehicles. Just like a rental car company doesn’t want someone to pass away when they rent their vehicles.”

Whether the BLM is at fault for allowing companies like Haldiman’s to function will be tested in court in Edwards’ lawsuit.

The law allows public agencies like the BLM broad discretion in how they enforce regulations, and judges have upheld that principle in the past.

Edwards, Dorsey’s mother, said she realizes that litigation won’t bring her daughter back. Dorsey didn’t get to attend her brother’s wedding and won’t finish her studies of crime scene investigation at the University of Baltimore.

However, measures such as GPS tracking on ATVs, preventing tours above a certain temperature threshold and thorough safety briefings would be a step forward, she said.

“I felt doing nothing was not an option,” the mother said. “If doing something, making a loud cry, can cause somebody to be saved, then it’s worth it.”

Contact Alan Halaly at [email protected]. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.

If you're in crisis

If you're thinking about suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, help is available 24/7 by calling or texting the Lifeline network at 988. Live chat is available at 988lifeline.org. Additionally, the Crisis Text Line is a free, national service available 24/7. Text HOME to 741741.