MASSACRE ON THE STRIP
More than 22,000 people jammed into a 6ha concert site on the famous Las Vegas strip for the final night of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival on Oct. 1. At 10.05 PM country music star Jason Aldean was only a few songs into his headline set when, from behind two blown-out windows on the 32nd floor of the adjacent Mandalay Bay hotel, retired accountant Stephen Paddock, 64, opened fire on those below. In a 10-minute period of terror, in which he fired 1,100 rounds of ammunition, Paddock murdered 59 people and injured more than 500.
“It was like we were in a war movie,” Rob Handley, 34, a medicaldevice salesman, told WHO. “You could hear the gunfire, then hear the bullets slamming down all around us. We were laying in puddles of blood … seeping down on us from the bleachers above.”
Despite the tragic frequency of mass shootings in the US, this one— the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in modern US history, and an “act of pure evil,” said President Donald Trump—shocked the nation and the world.
In the massacre’s aftermath, which reignited the usual debate about US gun laws, the nation sought answers. Few were forthcoming, however, not least because Paddock—a wealthy gambler and two-time divorcee whose bank-robber father, Benjamin, was once on the FBI’S most wanted list—killed himself in his hotel room. While details emerged of Paddock stockpiling 23 weapons in his room—a complimentary booking as he was a frequent gambler at the casino— his motive remains a mystery. As his brother, Eric, told reporters in the hours after the shooting, “there’s nothing. It makes no sense.”