Former Nevada congressional candidate and professional wrestler Dan Rodimer turned himself in to the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday night in connection with a Las Vegas slaying.
Rodimer’s Las Vegas lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press that Rodimer was “voluntarily surrendering to authorities and will post a court ordered bail.”
“He intends on vigorously contesting the allegations and asks that the presumption of innocence guaranteed all Americans be respected,” they said.
Rodimer turned himself in on Wednesday night.
On Oct. 29, 2023, emergency response was called to Crockfords Las Vegas at Resorts World on the Strip. Initially, it was believed Christopher Tapp, 47, was injured as a result of an accidental overdose and fall.
According to a report from the Clark County Coroner's Office, Tapp suffered an unwitnessed fall and was down about an hour before friends found him. Paramedics took him to Sunrise Hospital, where his toxicology report was positive for cocaine, alcohol and marijuana.
With multiple brain bleeds, "he was given a poor prognosis and family was deciding on comfort measures," the report said. He was pronounced dead at the hospital on Nov. 5.
The coroner found bruising on Tapp's head and abdomen, as well as a cut on his scalp, and ruled his death as homicide by blunt force trauma to the head, with additional causes of recent cocaine use and hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
Tapp spent 20 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.
Police said the investigation showed Tapp was involved in a fight inside a hotel room on Oct. 29 before being found.
Police identified Rodimer, 45, as the suspect. On March 6, an arrest warrant was issued for Rodimer on a charge of open murder. As of Wednesday afternoon, police said he was not yet in custody.
Rodimer signed with WWE in 2006 but was released from his developmental contract about a year later. In 2020, he won the Republican primary for Nevada's third congressional district, and narrowly lost to Democrat incumbent Susie Lee in the general election.
He later moved to Texas, where he was among 23 candidates who ran in a special congressional election in 2021 to fill the seat of Republican Ron Wright, who was the first member of Congress to die after contracting COVID-19. He finished in the middle of the pack, getting less than 3% of the vote.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
