LAS
VEGAS — In her first public statement since the Las Vegas massacre, the
gunman’s girlfriend said Wednesday that he had sent her on a trip to
the Philippines and wired her money there, but that she did not know he
was planning to harm anyone.
The statement from the woman, Marilou Danley,
which was read by her lawyer, Matthew Lombard, came after Ms. Danley
went to the Los Angeles offices of the F.B.I. for questioning, according
to a law enforcement official. It was released as the authorities
sought her insight into what prompted a man with no evident criminal
history to become a mass murderer.
She
stressed that she returned to the United States voluntarily, “because I
know that the F.B.I. and the Las Vegas police department wanted to talk
to me, and I wanted to talk to them.”
• The authorities found evidence that the gunman, Stephen Paddock,
planned to escape after the shooting and survive, Sheriff Joseph
Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said at a news
conference on Wednesday evening.
•
The bureau is trying to reconstruct Mr. Paddock’s actions, including
finding and interviewing “everyone and anyone who crossed his path in
recent weeks,” Andrew G. McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I., said
at a cybersecurity conference in Boston.
• The killer “is an individual who was not on our radar or anyone’s radar prior to the event,” Mr. McCabe said in an interview with CNBC
outside the conference. “So we really have a challenging bit of
detective work to do here, to kind of put the pieces back together after
the fact.”
• The police on Tuesday revised the number of victims killed on Sunday to 58. All but three of the people have been identified. These are some of their stories.
• President Trump
visited Las Vegas on Wednesday and offered words of support for the
victims. “The message that I have is that we have a great country and we
are there for you,” he said.
No links to terrorism have been found, the F.B.I. says.
Aaron
Rouse, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said there was
“no evidence to indicate terrorism, but this is an ongoing
investigation.” Mr. Rouse said at a news conference on Wednesday evening
that agents were pursuing several theories about what may have
motivated Mr. Paddock.
Sheriff
Lombardo seemed skeptical that Mr. Paddock moved the guns into his
hotel suite by himself. More than 20 guns and thousands of rounds of
ammunition were recovered in the suite. They had been brought into the
Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in at least 10 suitcases, the authorities
said.
“It was troublesome that he was able to move this much gear into the hotel unassisted,” the sheriff said.
A
leaked photograph of the gunman’s hotel suite appears to show a piece
of paper on a table. Asked about the note, the sheriff said, “It was not
a suicide note.”
Law
enforcement officials said on Tuesday that ammonium nitrate had been
recovered from Mr. Paddock’s car at the Mandalay Bay. On Wednesday,
Sheriff Lombardo said the car also contained other explosives: 50 pounds
of tannerite, a nonflammable exploding target used for practice, and
1,600 rounds of ammunition.
The gunman’s girlfriend said she didn’t know he was ‘planning violence.’
“I
knew Stephen Paddock as a kind, caring, quiet man. I loved him and
hoped for a quiet future together with him,” Ms. Danley said in her
statement. “It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was
planning violence against anyone.”
Ms.
Danley said she was grateful to Mr. Paddock for the trip to the
Philippines, her native country, to visit family, but when he wired her
money, “which he said was for me to buy a house for me and my family,”
she feared that it was his “way of breaking up with me.”
Ms.
Danley boarded a flight from Manila to Los Angeles on Tuesday,
according to Antonette Mangrobang, a spokeswoman for the Philippine
Immigration Bureau.
The
authorities, who met Ms. Danley at the Los Angeles airport, have called
her a “person of interest” in the shooting investigation, which does
not necessarily mean that she is suspected of committing a crime. She
was out of the country when the shooting occurred.
More
than three hours after her flight came in from Manila, an airport
police officer confirmed that she had been taken out of the terminal
through a side exit.
In an interview with ABC News,
Reynaldo Bustos, Ms. Danley’s brother, said he had spoken with her
after the shooting. He said she told him not to panic and that she had a
“clean conscience.”
Ms.
Danley met Mr. Paddock when she was working at a Nevada casino and he
was a high-limit player, casino employees said. She worked at the
Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno from 2010 to 2013, according to her
LinkedIn account.
John
Weinreich, an executive casino host at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa
at the time, said he believed that Ms. Danley frequently attended to Mr.
Paddock, serving him food and pointing out which machines might be ripe
for a payout, eventually becoming his regular host. Read more about Ms. Danley here.
The president met with victims of the attack.
Mr.
Trump spent four hours in Las Vegas on Wednesday, including paying
tribute to the professionalism of the doctors who treated the Las Vegas
shooting victims. He said that meeting with the patients at one hospital
made him “proud to be an American.”
The
president said he met with some “absolutely terribly wounded” patients
and hailed their bravery during the horrific attack Sunday night. He
said many of those he met with were wounded as they sought to help
others amid the hail of bullets from the shooter in a nearby hotel.
In
brief remarks to reporters before meeting with law enforcement
officials in Las Vegas, Mr. Trump said, “I think the only message I can
say is that we are with you 100 percent.” Read more about his visit from our reporters.
A
total of 489 people were injured in the attack, and 317 have been
released from hospitals, Sheriff Lombardo said Wednesday evening.
Las
Vegas police officers took cover and directed concertgoers to safety as
gunshots rang out on Sunday, newly released body camera footage shows.
“Hey,
you guys, get down,” one officer shouted at bystanders between volleys
of gunfire. “Go that way. Get out of here. There are gunshots coming
from over there. Go that way.”
But
some people did not believe they were under attack and rebuffed orders
to evacuate. “That’s fireworks,” one bystander shouted at officers.
Another yelled expletives when told to take cover.
As sirens blared and gunfire crackled, the video showed, officers strained to find the source of the shots.
“Hey,
they’re shooting right at us, guys,” one officer said as he and his
colleagues crouched behind a wall with their weapons drawn. “Everybody
stay down, stay down.”
“North of the Mandalay Bay, it’s coming out of a window,” another officer says.
The
three-minute video released by the police on Tuesday was a compilation
of footage from the cameras of several officers at the scene.
“There’s multiple people shot up there,” someone says in one clip.
“We see muzzle blasts from the Mandalay Bay,” someone, apparently an officer, said in another clip.
The
police have also confirmed the authenticity of leaked photographs of
the deceased gunman with a revolver by his side and of his hotel suite,
showing ammunition and rifles.
Graphic
Las Vegas Shooting: Chaos at a Concert and a Frantic Search at Mandalay Bay
How one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history unfolded.
The gunman had stockpiled weapons.
Mr.
Paddock, 64, had been buying weapons since 1982, including 33 in the
past year, Jill A. Snyder, the special agent in charge of the San
Francisco office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, told CBS on Wednesday.
Asked
if such purchases would set off any alarms, she clarified that the
bureau would not have been alerted. The Gun Control Act of 1968 requires
sellers to report the sale or disposition of two or more handguns to
the same buyer, only if those purchases occur at the same time or within
five business days of each other. There is no federal law requiring
sellers to alert the bureau to the sale of multiple rifles.
Twelve
of the rifles Mr. Paddock had in his luxury suite on the 32nd floor of
the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino were outfitted with a “bump stock,” a
device that enables a gun to fire like a machine gun, with hundreds of
rounds per minute, which may explain how he was able to rain such
devastation on the crowd below, law enforcement officials said.
Such
devices are generally legal, and the possibility that he may have used
them set off a fresh round of calls by Democratic lawmakers in
Washington to pass more gun regulations after the tragedy.
Semiautomatic
rifles, like those the gunman had, are made to fire a single round with
each pull of the trigger. But recordings and witness accounts of the
shooting made it clear that Mr. Paddock was firing much faster, at a
rate comparable to that of a fully automatic weapon, which quickly fires
round after round with a single pull of the finger. Undersheriff Kevin
McMahill of the Las Vegas police said that Mr. Paddock fired on the
concertgoers for nine to 11 minutes, in about a dozen bursts.
The
police have found a total of 47 firearms in his two houses and the
hotel suite. Ms. Snyder said on Tuesday that almost all had been traced,
and that they had been bought in Nevada, Utah, California and Texas.
Mr.
McCabe of the F.B.I. dismissed “dubious claims of responsibility” — a
reference to statements from the Islamic State group claiming that the
killer was one of its followers — and said that investigators are
seeking “actual indicators of motive and intent.”
A deeper portrait of the gunman’s life is emerging.
Mr.
Paddock could be imperious and demanding, expecting other people to
wait on him, according to people who knew him. But his youngest brother
said he was different with Ms. Danley.
“She
was probably one of the only people I’ve ever seen that he’d go out of
his way to do a little thing for,” said Eric Paddock, who lives in
Florida. “He went out of his way to be nice to her. This is not
something Steve does — go out of his way.”
The
gunman was a professional gambler who routinely won and lost thousands
of dollars at casinos in Reno and Las Vegas, which often provided him
free rooms. “He was a math guy,” Eric Paddock said. “He could tell you
off the top of his head what the odds were, down to a tenth of a percent
on whatever machine he was playing.”
Stephen
Paddock was the eldest of four boys who grew up angry after their
father vanished from their lives, but he was the least angry of the
group, said another brother, Patrick Paddock. He said that for years,
their mother, who struggled to support them on her own, hid from them
the fact that their father, a bank robber, had gone to prison, so they had no idea where he was.
“My
brother was the most boring one in the family,” he said of Stephen. “He
was the least violent one in the family, over a 30-year history, so
it’s like, who?”
He said he had not spoken with his oldest brother in 20 years, but would not say why.
Stephen
Paddock graduated from California State University, Northridge, a large
public institution in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, in 1977.
Carmen Ramos Chandler, the university’s director of media relations,
said that he had completed a degree in business administration.
His
work history was not completely clear. Mr. Paddock worked for the
federal government for roughly 10 years, from 1975 to 1985, a
spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management confirmed.
Investigators
unearthed multiple job applications, with Mr. Paddock’s fingerprints on
file, as part of records reflecting his employment as a letter carrier
for the Postal Service in the mid 1970s; as an Internal Revenue Service
agent from 1978 to 1984; and as an auditor focused on defense contracts,
a job he held until 1985. He also worked in the 1980s for one of the
companies that later combined to form Lockheed Martin, the aerospace
contractor.
