The Weight of a Verdict: Decades Behind Bars for a Las Vegas Tragedy

In truth, the wheels of justice can turn slowly, but turn they do. And so, on a Monday morning in a Las Vegas courtroom, a somber chapter finally closed on a devastating double murder from three years prior. Aaron Joe Williams, a man of 37 years, now faces a minimum of 17 years and a maximum of 43 years behind state prison walls for taking two lives.

It’s a sentence that, you could say, tries to reckon with an almost unfathomable act of violence. Williams, standing before District Judge Tierra Jones, had previously entered a guilty plea this past April to two rather grave charges: second-degree murder, each accompanied by a deadly weapon enhancement. Honestly, the specifics of legal terms often feel distant, but the human cost, that’s never truly forgotten.

The tragedy, as it unfolded, dates back to April 2021. The setting? The Rancho De Montana Apartments, tucked away near Cheyenne Avenue and Rancho Drive. What started, by all accounts, as an argument over a marijuana purchase and other items escalated, terribly so, into pure mayhem. Williams, it seems, first shot Hason Kelly, who was 40 at the time. Then, and this is where it gets even more heartbreaking, Andrew Williams, a 32-year-old with no familial ties to Aaron, stepped in. He tried, bravely one might add, to disarm the gunman. But his heroic effort was met with a bullet, too. Both men died.

And now, three years later, the legal consequences have crystallized. Judge Jones structured the sentence with a certain gravity, a series of terms meant to reflect the dual nature of the crime. Williams received two concurrent terms of 10 to 25 years for the murder charges themselves. For the deadly weapon enhancements — a chilling detail, isn’t it? — he got two concurrent terms of 2 to 8 years. But, perhaps most significantly, Jones mandated a separate 5- to 10-year term to be served consecutively, specifically for the second murder and its weapon charge. This layering is what culminates in that wide range: a minimum of 17 years before parole is even a consideration, stretching to a potential 43 years maximum.

For the families of Hason Kelly and Andrew Williams, one can only imagine the mix of emotions. Justice, in this instance, has been served; a man is being held accountable. But the raw, aching void left by their loved ones, well, that’s a sentence of a different kind entirely, one that persists long after the courtroom doors close.