LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – He was once only thousands of votes away from becoming a Nevada Congressman, but now he is facing a murder charge.
FOX5 continues to dig into the past of Dan Rodimer and the timeline of the investigation that led to his arrest Wednesday.
Rodimer turned himself in and was scheduled to appear in court Thursday, but because he posted a $200,000 bail, he is now out of jail. Rodimer, a former professional wrestler from New Jersey, moved to Texas and ran for Congress after his failed run against Susie Lee in Nevada in 2020.
Now he is accused of assaulting a man at a Halloween party at Resorts World. That man died days later at Sunrise Hospital.
Rodimer, a father of six, attended that party with his wife and stepdaughter. Rodimer’s stepdaughter’s friend told investigators the girls were doing drugs in the“Fun room,” the master bathroom, which had lines of cocaine already prepared, with a rolled-up $100 bill to ingest the cocaine.
According to the witness, Christopher Tapp walked in and also started using the drugs. Several witnesses report Rodimer accused Tapp of giving his daughter the drugs and then assaulted him.
Court documents obtained by FOX5 show a series of text messages just hours later, including Rodimer’s wife asking for a divorce.
“I’m going to do extensive discovery murderous behavior and all the horrible photos of the bruise marks that you put on me… I watched you nearly murder. Somebody and I had to take your ******* hands off his neck as he laid there and you ran away,” she said.
Accusations of domestic violence did come up during his campaign run in 2020. His opponent accused Rodimer of having an “alarming, violent rap sheet.”
In the two months following the incident, Metro detectives obtained security video from before and after the Halloween party, interviewed a number of witnesses, even traveling out of state to do so, and obtained orders to search the Rodimer family’s text messages and wiretap their calls.
Rodimer’s attorneys tell FOX5 that “he intends on vigorously contesting the allegations and asks that the presumption of innocence guaranteed all Americans be respected.”
Rodimer is expected to appear in court on April 10.
The victim had been in prison in Idaho for 20 years, wrongfully convicted of a rape and murder. Tapp was released in 2019. In 2022, Tapp and the City of Idaho Falls settled a lawsuit awarding him $11.7 million.
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