Investigators look at the preparation of massacre
safety-glass windows in his suite with a sledgehammer.
At 10.05pm, as country singer Jason Aldean strummed through his final set on stage, Paddock opened fire.
In the crowd, they thought it was fireworks.
“At first, there were all these pops and we thought it was nothing, but then everyone seemed to realise at once we were being attacked,” says Shannon Monosky, a 22-yearold Pennsylvania student.
“It was chaos. People were getting trampled, they were on the ground, they were bloody. I thought they had fallen down and gotten cut or something, because it was the last thing you wanted to believe, that people were actually getting killed in front of you.”
Dramatic video from police bodycams reveals the response of officers at the festival.
“Shots fired,” says one. “Sounded like an automatic firearm. It’s coming from upstairs in the Mandalay Bay. Upstairs Mandalay Bay, halfway up. I see the shots coming from Mandalay Bay, halfway up.”
The hunt began for the shooter, who was unleashing hundreds of rounds of gunfire into a crowd of men, women and children packed in an enclosed space the size of four football fields.
At 10.12pm, the first two officers arrived on the 31st floor of the Mandalay Bay and announced that the assault was coming from above them.
Three minutes later, the gunfire stopped. These times were determined by police bodycams and released publicly on Wednesday by Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lom- bardo, who said: “To the best of our estimates and video review, he continued to fire at a progressive, successive rate for approximately nine minutes.”
The first two officers reached the 32nd floor at 10.17pm. A minute later, they discovered security guard Jesus Campos, who had been shot in the leg but was able to direct them towards Paddock’s room. Despite being unarmed, Campos approached the shooter’s door. Remarkably, just one of the 200 rounds Paddock fired at him hit its target.
“I was just doing my job,” said Campos, who continued to help police clear surrounding hotel rooms and has been credited with distracting Paddock and saving many lives.
From 10.26pm to 10.30pm