Sometimes, the answer is that there is no answer
Las Vegas killer Stephen Paddock left no suicide note.
Sometimes, there’s just no knowing. No answers. In a world of technological brilliance, sophisticated forensics, unprecedented surveillance and expert psychological auditing, it’s difficult to accept the inexplicable, the unfathomable.
Last week we learned that we likely will never learn the cause of two spectacular mysteries: What motivated Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock, and why Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished.
Two doorstopper final reports were released, by the Vegas police department and Malaysia’s civil aviation authority, respectively 187 and 495 pages. Both are highly detailed, both — more so the latter because the aircraft has never been found, except for a few pieces of wreckage — end on an unsatisfying note of speculation.
“What we have been able to answer are the questions of who, what, when, where and how,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told reporters on Friday. “What we have not been able to definitively answer is the ‘why’ Stephen Paddock committed this act.”
That investigation into the Oct. 1 slaughter by a single gunman, firing from two rooms at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, killing 57 and wounding 413 (by bullets or shrapnel), turned up tons of information about Paddock’s movements, history, medical records, finances, relationships and gambling losses.
But it offers no insight into why the 64-year-old one-time accountant and real estate entrepreneur barricaded himself inside a 32nd floor suite with 24 firearms, most of them semi-automatic assault weapons, discharging more than a thousand rounds, up to 144 volleys at a time, into the crowd below, some 22,000 men and women and children enjoying the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
Before turning a revolver on himself. Found splayed on the floor when a SWAT team blew the door, surrounded by 1,057 shell casings and 5,280 rounds of unspent ammunition. He acted alone. He had no criminal record, his only interaction with law enforcement a few driving infractions.
He had no debts, having paid off $600,000 in casino markers in a city where he’d been known as a “high-end roller.” Over a two-year period, his personal wealth had dropped from $2 million to $500,000.
He believed all religions ridiculous — no evidence of radicalization or ideology, no association with hate groups or a terrorist group, either foreign or domestic.
He left neither suicide note nor manifesto.
More than 2,000 investigative leads pursued, 22,000 hours of video reviewed, 252,000 images collected from preceding weeks — as Paddock travelled to his primary home in Mesquite, Nev., to Reno to Phoenix, checking in and out of hotels. A thousand warrants executed. (It’s astonishing how much of this material has been released, including the complete autopsy results — he suffered from hemorrhoids but no other physical issues, nothing wrong neurologically, no brain tumour as his flummoxed mother had suggested.) Only a guarded possibility, from his personal physician, that Paddock may have had a bipolar disorder but he took no medication for it, merely anti-anxiety drugs.
Son of a bank robber, a man once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, but hadn’t seen his father since childhood.
In the end, we’re left with only this observation from a brother, Eric, who told investigators Paddock may have committed the attack because “he had done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything.’’
According to the report: “If so, Paddock would have planned the attack to kill a large amount of people because he would want to be known as having the largest casualty count. Paddock always wanted to be the best and known to everybody.”
As, indeed, Vegas was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Intensely methodical about it and most likely had either rehearsed the attack or earlier considered other targets. Paddock had done computer searches on open-air concert venues, even, in the weeks prior, reserved a hotel room in Chicago during Lollapalooza, and yet another in Vegas during the Life is Beautiful festival, which took place in late September.
He culled data on SWAT tactics, weapons and explosive.
For a year before the Vegas assault, he suddenly began purchasing weapons — 55 between October 2016 and September 2017, at a cost of some $95,000, plus thousands and thousands of ammunition rounds.
Had never exhibited any interest in guns before that, according to a long-time girlfriend, the woman he packed off to visit her relatives in the Philippines a few weeks before checking into the Mandalay Bay and to whom he then wired $150,000.
Extensive video was recov- ered of Paddock making multiple trips from his car in the casino garage to his suite, hauling many suitcases and garbage bags which presumably held those rifles, though cleaning staff insisted they never saw weapons in his rooms.
That night, Oct. 1, before Paddock unleashed his barrage of bullets, he’d barricaded the stairwell door to the 32nd floor with an “L” bracket screwed into the door frame, which impeded a security officer responding to a guest service call generated for Room 32-129. He accessed the floor by a service elevator and was walking down the corridor when he was struck in the knee by a round, Paddock shooting through the bolted door.
Outside that door was a food service cart, fitted with a camera eyeballing the hall, with a wire trailing under the door, connected to a laptop computer, providing a live feed of the hallway. Another camera was inserted inside the peephole.
Down below, a detective on crowd duty for the concert heard what sounded like a long burst of gunfire, coming from somewhere above as concertgoers began running in helterskelter panic. Using his binoculars, the detective scanned the north-facing tower of Mandalay Bay and spotted the silhouette of a man standing in a shooting position several feet back from a window. He was the first to put out a warning on his radio. In the minutes that followed, three officers would be among those hit by gunfire, one of them fatally wounded. Paddock knew when they were coming.
He began shooting at 10:05 p.m. The last volley was at 10:15 p.m. At 10:18, a heat detection indicator inside Room 32-135 recorded no further readings.
Paddock was dead. Put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That’s how a SWAT team found him when they blew open the door with an explosive device. Fourteen loaded rifles nearby.
All the elite investigators thrown on the case — from the FBI to the LVPD homicide squad to the ATF to counterterrorism analysts — and they just don’t know why Paddock did it.
Just as, on the other side of the world, aviation investigators have scarcely a clue what happened on doomed MH370, March 8, 2014, with 230 people on board, greatest airline mystery since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
A separate probe, by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, earlier concluded that everybody on the plane — pilot, co-pilot, passengers and crew — were unconscious as the uncontrolled aircraft ran out of fuel and plunged into the Indian Ocean. But the Malaysian investigation reveals someone controlled the plane for at least some of time after Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shad’s last contact with air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur, before it suddenly veered off-course.
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
The Malaysian investigation ruled out mechanical or computer failure. The Australian investigation cleared both the pilot and co-pilot, nothing in their backgrounds to suggest the plane had been brought down deliberately. Just two ordinary pilots. Just as Sherriff Lombardo said, on Friday, about Paddock: “An unremarkable man.”