Hospitals swamped with victims

LAS VEGAS: The victims just kept coming. In cars, in ambulances waiting four or five deep, from the wounded to the barely alive, they arrived in droves.

“I have no idea who I operated on,” said Dr. Jay Coates, a trauma surgeon whose hospital took in many of the wounded after a gunman opened fire from his 32nd-floor hotel suite Sunday night on a country music concert below. “They were coming in so fast, we were taking care of bodies. We were just trying to keep people from dying.”

It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, with at least 59 killed and 527 injured, some by gunfire, some during the chaotic escape.

University Medical Center of Southern Nevada was one of many hospitals that were overflowing. “Every bed was full,” Coates said. “We had people in the hallways, people outside and more people coming in.”

He said the huge, horrifying wounds on his operating table told him this shooting was something different. “It was very clear that the first patient I took back and operated on that this was a high-powered weapon,” Coates said. “This wasn’t a normal street weapon. This was something that did a lot of damage when it entered the body cavity.”

While Paddock appeared to have no criminal history, his father was a bank robber who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list in the 1960s.

“I can’t even make something up,” his brother in Florida, Eric Paddock, said when asked what might have motivated his brother. “There’s just nothing.”

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called the gunman “demented” and a “very, very sick individual.”