Las Vegas Shooting Near Mandalay Bay Casino Kills 58
LAS
VEGAS — A gunman on a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel rained a
rapid-fire barrage on an outdoor concert festival on Sunday night,
killing at least 58 people, injuring hundreds of others, and sending
thousands of terrified survivors fleeing for cover, in one of the
deadliest mass shootings in American history.
Online
video of the attack near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino showed the
singer Jason Aldean’s performance at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a
three-day country music event, being interrupted by the sound of
gunfire. The music stopped, and as victims fell bleeding, concertgoers
screamed, ducked for cover, or ran.
“Get down,” one shouted. “Stay down,” screamed another.
Tenaja
Floyd of Boise, Idaho, said many of the people around her in the
concert crowd thought at first that the sounds came from fireworks, but
“I knew immediately, that wasn’t fireworks.” She said her mother,
Jennifer, threw her to the ground and lay on top of her to protect her.
As people started running out of the venue, she said, they thought they
might be trampled, so they decided to join the rush to leave.
Sheriff
Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said on
Monday morning that 58 people were confirmed dead and 515 more had been
injured. One of those killed was an off-duty Las Vegas police officer,
the department said. The sheriff said there were about 22,000 people at
the concert.
Aaron
Rouse, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said
investigators saw no immediate evidence connecting the attack to an
international terrorist organization.
SWAT
units swarmed the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay, closing in on the
source of the shooting, a room on the 32nd floor where they found the
gunman with “in excess of 10 rifles,” the sheriff said. “We believe the
individual killed himself prior to our entry.”
Sheriff
Lombardo said that the gunman brought the weapons into the hotel on his
own and that he had smashed the windows of the hotel room with a
hammerlike device. “This is an individual that was a lone wolf,” he
said.
The
first reports of the shooting came at 10:08 p.m. local time. Officers
were overheard on police radio channels reporting that they were pinned
down by gunfire. Shortly before midnight, the Las Vegas police reported that “one suspect is down,” and soon after, the police said they did not believe there were any more active gunmen.
The
sheriff identified the suspected gunman as Stephen Paddock, 64, of
Mesquite, Nev., who had no significant prior criminal history.
Before
dawn on Monday, the police searched Mr. Paddock’s house in Mesquite, a
town on the Nevada-Arizona border. The police moved cautiously at first,
evacuating surrounding homes in case there were any explosives, but
none were found. The Mesquite Police Department said no one was in the
house; at least one firearm and ammunition were found, they said, but
they gave few other details about what the search turned up.
Eric Paddock, a brother of Stephen Paddock who lives in Orlando, Fla., said he had made a statement to the police. In an interview with CBS,
he said that his brother was “not an avid gun guy at all,” adding, “if
he had have killed my kids, I couldn’t be more dumbfounded.”
“The fact that he had those kind of weapons is just — where the hell did he get automatic weapons?” Eric Paddock asked.
“He
has no military background or anything like that,” he added. “He’s a
guy who lived in a house in Mesquite and drove down and gambled in Las
Vegas.”
He said Stephen Paddock had recently texted him to ask how their mother was faring after Hurricane Irma.
Graphic
How the Shooting on the Las Vegas Strip Unfolded
How the attack at a country music festival unfolded.
Speaking
at the White House, President Trump called the shooting “an act of pure
evil,” ordered flags flown at half-staff, and said he would travel to
Las Vegas on Wednesday.
“The
F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are working closely with
local authorities to assist in the investigation,” Mr. Trump said, and
he praised the performance of the Las Vegas police. “The speed with
which they reacted was miraculous and prevented further loss of life.”
Video
of the shooting captured nine seconds of rapid-fire, continuous bursts
of fire, followed by 37 seconds of silence from the weapon and panicked
screaming from the crowd. Gunfire then erupted again in at least two
more bursts, both shorter than the first.
In
the confusion after the shooting, the police also descended on the Ali
Baba Restaurant, about a 10-minute drive from the Mandalay Bay, and they
also investigated reports of a shooting at the New York-New York Hotel
and Casino, not far from the concert ground.
The
police reported clearing out the Mandalay Bay’s 29th floor and working
their way up to the 32nd floor. A police Twitter post described reports
of an “active shooter” near or around the Mandalay Bay casino.
Video from the shooting showed Mr. Aldean, the final performer of the night, running off the stage as the gunfire erupted.
Jake
Owen, a country singer who was on stage with Mr. Aldean when the
shooting began, told CNN on Monday that it was like “shooting fish in a
barrel from where he was.”
“This is not an exaggeration: This shooting was going on for at least 10 minutes,” he added. “It was nonstop.”
Concertgoers
described hearing round after round of gunfire. “Everyone was running,
you could see people getting shot,” Gail Davis, one of the witnesses,
said. “I’ve never been that scared in my life,” she added. “To have this
happen, I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
“It just kept coming,” another witness, Robyn Webb, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “It was relentless.”
She said she saw about 20 people bleeding in the street.
“That’s when we knew for sure it was real,” said her companion, Matt Webb.
A photo posted by a Review-Journal photographer showed emergency responders transporting one injured person in a wheelbarrow.
University
Medical Center, which has Nevada’s only level 1 trauma center, took in
104 patients, arriving by ambulance and private cars, including four who
died, and 12 who were in critical condition on Monday morning. “We had
our first rush and it was nonstop,” said Danita Cohen, a hospital
administrator.
Ordinarily,
the trauma center would taken in eight to 10 traffic accident victims
in a night. But the trauma teams regularly train for mass casualty
events; the most recent session was led by an emergency responder from
the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
Dignity
Health-St. Rose Dominican Hospital received 56 patients at its three
campuses, including four who were in critical condition. Most had
suffered gunshots, but others had been trampled while fleeing, or had
been hurt climbing fences to escape the shooting.
“No one has experienced patient volumes to this level,” said Jennifer Cooper, a hospital spokeswoman.
As
survivors poured into streets and buildings surrounding the concert
site, and the police and paramedics streamed into the scene, unsure how
many gunmen there were, the massacre shut down roads and highways; the
police reported closing off about a mile of Las Vegas Boulevard and
asked the public to steer clear of the area. Hours later, much of the
city remained shut down.
McCarran
International Airport in Las Vegas, just east of the Mandalay, said
that some flights destined for the airport were diverted because of
police activity, and some of the people fleeing the scene ran to the
airport, disrupting operations there.
Krystal
Legette, who was visiting from New York, and several other people were
at Sundance Helicopters office at the airport, waiting for a sightseeing
flight around the city, when she said three women burst into the
building, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting.” Then another
woman came in, bleeding from a bullet wound in her right arm, and Ms.
Legette, a nurse, and three others applied a tourniquet.
More
and more people ran into the office, until about 100 people had taken
shelter there, she said. A company worker turned out the lights, locked
the doors and told everyone to go inside closets and other areas away
from the windows.
The hotel itself was placed on virtual lockdown after the shooting, guests said.“We
went into the hotel and they started shutting down casinos,” Todd
Price, a guest of Mandalay Bay, told CNN. “We tried to get into our
rooms, and they shut down the elevators and started to get everybody
out.”
The Route 91 Harvest Festival
bills itself as “three days of country music on the Vegas Strip,” and
Sunday night’s performance was the last of the festival. The site of the
concert, the Las Vegas Village and Festival Grounds, run by MGM
Resorts, sprawls over 15 acres and has a capacity of 40,000 people. The
festival’s website said this year’s three-day concert was sold out.
In
the first hours after the shooting, the police searched for a woman
described as “a companion” of the gunman, Marilou Danley. Later, the
sheriff said she had been located out of the country, and apparently was
not with Mr. Paddock when he checked into the hotel, but that “he was
utilizing some of her identification.”
Eric Paddock identified Ms. Danley as his brother’s girlfriend. “We were worried that he might have hurt her, too,” he said.
