Shooter’s motive unclear
Prostitutes, cruises abroad and cryptic note queried to find reason for massacre.
After five days of scouring the life of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock and chasing 1000 leads, investigators admitted yesterday they still don’t know what drove him to mass murder, and they announced plans to put up billboards appealing for the public’s help.
Investigators were looking into whether he was with a prostitute days before the shooting, scrutinising cruises he took and trying to make sense of a cryptic note with numbers jotted on it found in his hotel room, a federal official said.
Investigators believe Paddock hired a prostitute in the days leading up to the shooting and were interviewing other call girls for information, a US official briefed by federal law enforcement officials said.
Examinations of Paddock’s politics, finances, any possible radicalisation and his social behaviour — typical investigative avenues that have helped uncover the motive in past shootings — have turned up little.
“We still do not have a clear motive or reason why,” Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said.
“We have looked at literally everything.”
Paddock, a reclusive 64-year-old high-stakes gambler, rained bullets on the crowd at a country music festival a week ago from his 32ndfloor hotel suite, killing 58 and wounding hundreds before taking his own life.
McMahill said investigators had reviewed voluminous video from the casino and don’t think Paddock had an accomplice in the shooting.
Paddock took at least a dozen cruises abroad in the last few years, most of them with his girlfriend, Marilou Danley. At least one sailed to the Middle East.
What officers have found is that Paddock planned his attack meticulously. He requested an upper-floor room overlooking the festival, stockpiled 23 guns, a dozen of them modified to fire continuously like an automatic weapon, and set up cameras inside and outside his room to watch for approaching officers.
In a possible sign he was contemplating massacres at other sites, he also booked rooms overlooking the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago in August and the Life Is Beautiful show near the Vegas Strip in late September, according to authorities reconstructing his movements leading up to the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
Two bullets fired during the mass shooting struck a large jet fuel storage tank at the edge of McCarran International Airport, and one round pierced the tank, but there was no fire or explosion.
Airport authorities declined to speculate on whether Paddock was aiming to hit the cylindrical 43,000-barrel fuel tank or whether the vessel was struck by two stray rounds in the midst of the shooting spree.
But the position of the fuel tank, about twice as far from Paddock’s high-rise hotel perch as the country music festival he strafed, and at a different angle to the hotel, suggested he deliberately aimed at the tank.
Meanwhile, some gun industry
“We still do not have a clear motive or reason why. We have looked at literally everything.” Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill
experts say the National Rifle Association’s push for “bump stocks” to be re-evaluated by the Government after the massacre is little more than a ruse to stall any momentum for wider gun control.
Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, said the NRA “can throw
a sacrificial lamb of bump stocks because they know that gun owners don’t use them or like them”.
The devices, originally intended to help people with disabilities, fit over the stock and pistol grip of a semi-automatic rifle and allow the weapon to fire continuously, mimicking a fully automatic firearm. Bump stocks were found among Paddock’s arsenal in his hotel room.
It was not immediately clear whether President Donald Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, could order it to re-evaluate its judgment about devices.