The prosecution began with a December 2023 emergency call and ended after Brandon Tenorio admitted murdering Kourtney Glover.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Nearly three years separated the emergency response to Kourtney Glover’s killing from the sentencing of Brandon Tenorio, whose case moved from multiple initial allegations and a detailed police investigation to a guilty plea for first-degree murder and a sentence of 20 years to life.
Chief District Judge Tierra Jones imposed the sentence Sept. 10, 2026, under a plea agreement in which Tenorio and prosecutors agreed to recommend 20 years to life in exchange for his first-degree murder plea. The final disposition provides a clear endpoint to a case whose public record appeared in pieces: an initial police response, Glover’s identification, an arrest report containing a witness account and Tenorio’s statements, preliminary charges, and finally the plea and sentencing. Read in sequence, those records show how the case changed from an active homicide investigation involving allegations against a 39-year-old suspect into a murder conviction against Tenorio, now 42.
The first public stage came on the night of Dec. 20, 2023. Police were called to a residence in the 3500 block of Mountain Valley Drive, near Fort Apache Road and Gowan Road, shortly before 8 p.m. Metropolitan Police Department officers found an unresponsive woman inside and pronounced her dead. Early police information said she had suffered stab wounds and blunt-force injuries during an encounter involving her boyfriend. Officers arrested Tenorio. At that moment, the victim had not yet been publicly identified, the investigation was new and no court had determined whether the allegations against Tenorio were true.
By the next day, the criminal case had entered Las Vegas Justice Court. Records cited in contemporaneous reporting listed open murder, kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon on an older person. Police said Tenorio and the victim were in a relationship. The preliminary allegations reflected more than the woman’s death because investigators were also examining what had happened to a family member inside the home. Tenorio remained in custody. A justice of the peace subsequently ordered him held without bail. Those proceedings established the framework of the prosecution but were not convictions, and the charges would later be superseded in practical importance by Tenorio’s first-degree murder plea.
On Dec. 22, the Clark County coroner’s office identified the woman as Kourtney Glover, 36, of Las Vegas. The identification shifted public reporting from an unnamed homicide victim to a case involving a specific person whose family would later speak at Tenorio’s sentencing. Police continued to describe evidence of both blunt-force and sharp-force injuries. Glover had been found inside the same Mountain Valley Drive home where Tenorio was arrested. At that point, however, the fuller narrative of how police said the violence had been discovered had not yet emerged in the reporting.
That account became public through the arrest report. Tenorio’s grandmother told investigators that she had been upstairs in the home when she heard a loud thud. She went to investigate and saw Tenorio standing over Glover while Glover was on the floor, police said. According to her statement, Tenorio was hitting Glover with a hammer. She attempted to pull him away but was pushed aside. The grandmother then tried to flee through the garage. Police said Tenorio caught up with her and dragged her back into the house while telling her he was not going to kill her.
The grandmother eventually got out again and made it to a neighbor’s residence, where she called 911. Her escape connected the internal events described in the arrest report with the police response already documented in the initial Dec. 20 coverage. Officers arrived at about 8:08 p.m. Tenorio came outside with his hands raised and blood on his hands and arms, according to investigators. The arrest report quoted him saying, “I did it. I killed her,” and telling officers that Glover was inside. The statement was made before the case had moved through years of court proceedings and long before his formal guilty plea.
Inside, officers found Glover at the base of the stairs near the kitchen and confirmed her death. Police documented blood in the home and reported finding a bloody hammer in a downstairs bathroom and three bloody kitchen knives in the kitchen. Those observations formed the physical portion of the public investigative record. They were accompanied by the grandmother’s account and Tenorio’s statements. Together, the materials gave authorities evidence extending beyond an argument inferred from the scene. Even so, at that stage Tenorio remained a defendant accused of crimes, and the prosecution still had to proceed through the court system.
Tenorio’s police interview supplied the most extensive account attributed to him. Investigators said he claimed to believe that people wanted to kill him and told detectives he heard voices regularly. One voice, he said, told him it was time to kill or be killed. He also claimed that a Signal message directed him to kill his grandmother. Tenorio described seeing a gas truck outside and interpreting it as part of a threat, then believing Glover was signaling to someone with a light. Those statements describe Tenorio’s reported perceptions. Police and news reports did not establish the alleged outside plot as a real event, and it should not be treated as an independently verified motive.
According to police, Tenorio also acknowledged attacking Glover with a hammer and then a knife. Investigators recorded his description of the sequence and his conduct afterward. Those admissions were significant evidence during the investigation, but the legal status of the case continued to matter: an admission in a police report is not the same procedural event as a guilty plea accepted in a criminal prosecution. For nearly three years, Tenorio’s case remained one that had begun with open-murder and related allegations. By 2026, the parties had reached an agreement that would make first-degree murder the offense of conviction.
The final public stage unfolded in Jones’ courtroom. Under the plea agreement, Tenorio admitted first-degree murder and the parties recommended a 20-years-to-life sentence. Glover’s father, William Davis, told the judge he wanted Tenorio to serve his time and strongly rejected the idea of leniency. Glover’s sister, Ashley Davis, said her sister’s life was not Tenorio’s to end. “There is no sentence long enough to restore what he took,” she told the court. Their statements turned the sentencing from a procedural endpoint into a record of the family’s continuing loss almost three years after Glover was killed.
Tenorio also addressed the court. He apologized and said he accepted responsibility. Special Public Defender Caitlyn McAmis told Jones that significant substance abuse and mental health problems had gone untreated when the killing occurred. Her statement provided context for sentencing and corresponded generally with the unusual perceptions Tenorio had described to police in 2023, but the available reports do not say that a court independently adopted a particular diagnosis or found that those issues excused the killing. By then, Tenorio had pleaded guilty and the hearing concerned punishment rather than whether he committed first-degree murder.
Jones imposed the agreed 20-years-to-life sentence, completing the principal prosecution that began with the Dec. 20, 2023, police response. The result leaves a record with sharply different stages: allegations at arrest, witness and defendant statements in an investigation, Glover’s formal identification, a later admission of guilt in court and finally punishment. No subsequent ruling altering the sentence was identified in the sources reviewed. As of Oct. 21, 2026, Tenorio stands convicted of first-degree murder and is serving the life sentence imposed for Glover’s death.
Author note: Last updated October 21, 2026.